Issues in Interpretation Theory (Marquette Studies in Philosophy)

Issues in Interpretation Theory

Issues in Interpretation Theory Edited by

Pol Vandevelde

Marquette Studies in Philosophy No. 49 Andrew Tallon, Series Editor

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Issues in interpretation theory / edited by Pol Vandevelde. p. cm. — (Marquette studies in philosophy ; no. 49) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-87462-672-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-87462-672-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hermeneutics. I. Vandevelde, Pol. BD241.I87 2006 121’.686—dc22 2006031621

Cover photo by Bobbi Timberlake. © 2006 Marquette University Press Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-3141 All rights reserved.

www.marquette.edu/mupress/

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Contents Foreword Pol Vandevelde ~ 7 1. The Genesis of the Heideggerian Interrogation on the Origin of the Work of Art Jacques Taminiaux ~ 11 2. Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism & Philosophy: Towards a ‘Non-Prosaic’ Conception of Consciousness Stephen Watson ~37 3. Hermeneutics: Another Look & Other Questions Ronald Bruzina ~ 73 4. Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot: A Phenomenological Reading Hans Rainer Sepp ~ 101 5. Engaging across Traditions: Royce & Gadamer on Interpretation David Vessey ~ 119 6. Ricoeur’s Narrative Hermeneutics in Relationship with Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics: Continuity & Discontinuity, Keith D’Souza ~ 137 7. The Question of (In)Tolerance in Heidegger’s Account of World-Disclosure Paul R. Gyllenhammer ~ 167

 Issues in Interpretation Theory

8. Vico and the New Science of Interpretation: Beyond Philosophical Hermeneutics & the Hermeneutics of Suspicion David Ingram ~ 199 9. Speaking to the World through Husserl & Merleau-Ponty D. R. Koukal ~ 225 10. Emergence & Interpretation Kenneth Maly ~ 247 11. Time, Otherness, & Possibility in the Experience of Hope Anthony J. Steinbock ~ 271 Notes on Contributors ~ 291 Index ~ 293

Foreword

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his volume contains a selection of the contributions made by the scholars who participated in the Seminar on Phenomenology and Hermeneutics organized at Marquette University since 2002. The Seminar originates from the needs manifested by faculty and graduate students from philosophy and theology at Marquette University to have a forum in which they could exchange the results of their research and interact with prominent scholars in the fields of phenomenology and hermeneutics. The confluence of interests between philosophy and theology has a long history. While hermeneutics was traditionally a dominion of theology as the main field of investigation of the Bible, philosophy came to recognize its interpretive nature especially with the different brands of existentialism. Karl-Otto Apel claims that we are now in a paradigm where language has taken the role of first philosophy. The complexity of issues related to how an object of investigation is chosen, delimited, and approached, as well as the slew of questions linked to how a subject forms and how far the historical or social boundaries of a subject reach have made the reflection on the mediation between subject and object a task of intellectual necessity. It is possible and in some instances, for example in processes of justification, valid to pursue the model of methodological solipsism that assumes the subject of knowledge to be a normal adult person exercising her faculty of knowledge independently of other subjects of knowledge. However, for many issues the question regarding the genesis of the subject (how the subject formed) and the social and historical influences on such a subject is directly linked to the choice of the objects of investigation, the methods of investigations, the determination of the utility of the investigation, and the allocation of resources. These questions in turn can be treated in a causal model, events or other people’s behaviors causing individuals to form certain beliefs. However, the causal model eliminates the need for meaning more than it explains what the meaning is, and some, like Donald Davidson, rejoice in this elimination. Phenomenology and hermeneutics have opted for a non-causal model of explanation, still enlivened by the hope expressed by Husserl to bring the still mute experience to expression.

 Issues in Interpretation Theory

When Friedrich Schlegel along with Schleiermacher, the founder of Romantic hermeneutics, worked toward a fusion of philosophy and poetry, what they had in view was an articulation of that fascinating mystery of a nature that seems amenable to intelligibility and the capacity of the human mind to bring order into the world. This was also Aristotle’s key concept of logos—reason, discourse, language—something like understanding. But the notion of understanding cannot be limited to an epistemological notion, as already recognized by Schleiermacher and Dilthey. It is also an ontological component of human existence, and Heidegger and Gadamer expanded much effort in articulating the ontological face of understanding. What was brought to the fore was the identity between what is described by phenomenology—the susceptibility to make sense both of things and human beings—and what makes human beings who they are—their capacity to understand themselves and things around them. If objects of investigation cannot be neatly disentangled from the framework in which they are represented as objects or appear as objects, the discourse that attempts to render these objects in context or to tell the prose of the world, to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s expression, cannot afford to pursue clarity at any cost. It is no easy task to do justice to the complexity of what gravitates around the objective hard core of things or the many perspectives through which a thing gives itself or the hue of shades through which something lets itself become visible or the nuances of what it means that something is. But there may be virtue in complexity. Disciplines that have reflected on what interpretation is, like phenomenology and hermeneutics, have also developed the conceptual tools as well as the methods suited to various objects of interpretation. They have the means to explain why the way knowledge is structured and things organized in objects of knowledge affects how human beings understand themselves. Yorck von Wartenburg wrote to Dilthey in 1889 that “the ‘modern human being,’ i.e., the human being since the Renaissance, is ready to be buried.” Less than a century later Michel Foucault was predicting another death of human being: “Ought we  Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck v. Wartenburg. 1887-1897. Hrsg. Sigfrid v.d. Schulenburg. Halle, 1923, 83, quoted in Martin Heidegger, Les conférences de Cassel (1925) précédées de la Correspondance Dilthey-Husserl (1911), bilingual edition by Jean-Claude Gens. Paris: Vrin, 2003, 208.

Foreword



not... give up thinking of man, or, to be more strict, to think of this disappearance of man—and the ground of possibility of all the sciences of man—as closely as possible in correlation with our concern with language? Ought we not to admit that, since language is here once more, man will return to that serene non-existence in which he was formerly maintained by the imperious unity of Discourse?” This interaction between epistemology, history, and ontology has been at the heart the research in phenomenology and hermeneutics. The essays gathered here testify to the broad range of issues and the variety of methods typical of these disciplines. The quality of the essays presented in this volume also testifies to the lively and fruitful exchanges of ideas made possible by Marquette University. I want to acknowledge the strong support of Dr. Michael McKinney, Dean of the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, Drs. John Jones and James South, chairs of the department of philosophy, and Frs. Philip Rossi and John Laurance, chairs of the department of theology, who all made possible the establishment of the Seminar on Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. I also want to acknowledge the contribution from faculty and students who lend life to the Seminar. Pol Vandevelde

 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1970], 386.

1 The Genesis of the Heideggerian Interrogation on the Origin of the Work of Art Jacques Taminiaux

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he text that can be rightly considered the most evident testimony to Heidegger’s involvement with the “national-socialist revolution” is the famous Rectorate Address that he pronounced in Freiburg in 1933 under the title The Self-Affirmation of the German University (Heidegger 2000, 109 ff ). However it is striking to note that, far from being a summary of the ideological slogans used by the regime now establishing itself, this text is meant to be essentially philosophical in its language and themes. More precisely, the ambition it manifests is to bring the German university, and consequently the German existence in its entirety, to the level of what the Greek beginning of philosophy had been, as it was illustrated by Plato when he celebrated in his works the way of life supposedly the highest accomplishment of the human condition: the bios theoretikos, dedicated to the contemplation of the ultimate ontological principles of what is. The Rectorate Address does not use the terms of the current racist ideology, but the key-words of the Platonic dialogues—theoria, energeia, techne, praxis. In passing, this speech skillfully subverts the themes these Greek words referred to in their original text and casts them in some of the key-words of the Nazi slogans—Kampf, Volk, Fűhrung, Sturm. In its conclusion it is in the shadow of Plato’s Republic that it evokes the articulation of the State ontologically justified, organized into a hierarchy of levels of activity: the satisfaction of the needs, the defense of the community, under the command of those who are dedicated to science, above whom are the philosophers. Therefore, it is as if, according to the Rectorate Address, Germany in 1933 was on the verge of ensuring the return of the Greek beginning.

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In the following pages, I propose to examine the stakes of the Heideggerian problematic of the return of Greece on the basis of the texts he devoted to the question of the origin of the work of art. This attention to art followed the Rectorate Address and developed in the mid-1930s. In order to determine these stakes, these texts have to be considered in combining two perspectives: an ontogenetic perspective consisting in considering their relationship to Heidegger’s previous works, starting with the most famous of them all, Being and Time, and a phylogenetic perspective consisting in determining the extent to which they draw their inspiration from other philosophers, ancient or modern. A careful reading of the Rectorate Address demonstrates that Heidegger mixes an ontogenetic and phylogenetic thread, in the sense that, on the one hand, he mobilizes some of the central themes of Being and Time—Dasein’s existence for the sake of oneself, its temporality, its resolution, its unveiling capacity—whereas, on the other hand, he appeals to Plato in the case of Ancient philosophy and both Hegel and Nietzsche in the case of Modern philosophy. This second inspiration is linked to the theme of the return since we know that the nostalgia for Greece played a determining role in the genesis of Hegel’s thought and in the work of his long-time friend Hölderlin; we also know that, starting with the first book on The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wanted to be the most Greek of his contemporaries. It could be claimed that these two paths form the fabric of the texts in which Heidegger articulated his questioning on the origin of the work of art. These texts are three and follow each other by a few months between the summer of 1935 and the beginning of the winter of 1936. Before proposing some elements for a genetic analysis of these texts by concentrating on the earliest one with respect to the theme of the return of Greece, it is not superfluous to ask whether, in spite of the fact that it is only in the mid 1930s that the philosophical interest in art suddenly took center stage, this interest does not have some roots in Heidegger’s works preceding the time of his involvement with Nazism. To such a question, it is tempting to oppose immediately a pointblank denial. One can search in vain for the words “art” and “work of art” in the very meticulous index of the English translation of Sein und Zeit, published in 1962 (Heidegger 1962). These words do not appear either in the equally meticulous index of Theodore Kisiel’s great book on the genesis of Being and Time in the lecture courses that Heidegger gave first in Freiburg, when he was Husserl’s assistant, then in Marburg

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(Kisiel 1995). However, it would be a mistake to conclude that nothing was anticipating the problematic of the origin of the work of art in Heidegger’s previous works.

1. The Ontogenesis of a problematic 1.1 The re-appropriation of the Greeks in the fundamental ontology Being and Time is a work that implements a theoretical project to which Heidegger gave the name of fundamental ontology. He was thereby aiming at a discipline centered not on beings and their properties, but on Being in the verbal sense. As it is proper for the question of Being, in this sense, to concern intimately the one who asks it, and thus to bear on him in return, Being and Time claimed that a rigorous and synthetic questioning on the diverse meanings of the word “Being” requires first a transcendental analysis, or an analytic of the mode of being of the human being. This mode of being is called Dasein, the substantive form of a verb that means, in everyday German “to exist” (the proofs of God’s existence, in Kant, are the proofs of God’s Dasein). Heidegger calls human being Dasein precisely because being and having to be form a stake that concerns him intimately. As is well known, this analytic, after isolating a certain number of intrinsic conditions for the possibility of human existence, factors called existentials, gathers them into a synthetic structure that is called Care—Sorge. In Heidegger’s vocabulary, this word designates a condition consisting, for Dasein, in finding itself at the same time thrown in its being among other beings, and projecting always anew a possibility of being which is proper to it and only belongs to it. Let us note that Dasein is not a generic title; it is always someone who exists factually at a given moment and can say: my existence; someone who responds to the question who?, and not the question what? Such Care, according to Heidegger, is finite in the sense that its own end—its death—determines it intrinsically. It is also fundamentally temporal, but of a temporality that, far from being an infinite series of instants in which it would be possible for it to stand, is rather fundamentally ecstatic, i.e., open to a limited future that it must face, while taking over the past this temporality is already. The fundamental ontology has the ambition of showing that this ecstatic and

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finite temporality of the thrown project characteristic of any Dasein is the only transcendental horizon of intelligibility of the sense of being. Hence the title: Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). In spite of the fact that the work of art does not appear among the themes of Being and Time, the roots of Heidegger’s questioning on that topic can be found in the works preparing the analytic of Dasein and, more generally, fundamental ontology. As it is well known, fundamental ontology constantly puts the emphasis on the oscillation in human existence between two poles: on the one hand, the authenticity which is Dasein’s resoluteness of its finite capacity to be and thus of its mortality, and, on the other hand, the everyday inauthenticity which for Dasein consists in being preoccupied by possibilities to be actualized in a world it shares with others, with whom it can be substituted, and to focus on goals to reach, tasks to accomplish, effects or works to produce. Thanks to the publication starting some years ago of the lecture courses Heidegger gave during the gestation of Being and Time, it now appears that the polarity between resolute authenticity and the inauthenticity of everyday concerns was articulated along a patient analysis of Greek philosophical texts: Plato’s dialogues as well as the Aristotelian corpus in which the young professor of Marburg enjoyed putting to the fore the Nicomachean Ethics, which he regarded as a true ontology of Dasein. Now, art appears among the themes of Aristotle’s treatise. The Greeks had only one word: techne, which can be translated as “knowing-how,” in order to designate the art of painters, sculptors, tragic poets, as well as the know-how of craftsmen such as potters, carpenters and shoemakers, etc., and the competence of experts such as physicians and strategists. They subsumed under a unique word, technites, all those who owned a knowing-how, no matter how diverse the activity their techne ruled could be. And this activity itself is of a considerable variety, since it can produce effects such as victory for the art of the strategist, healing for the art of the physician, tools for the art of the blacksmith, tragedies for the art of the dramaturgist. This activity was also subsumed under one single word, poiesis, which can be translated as “production.” It turns out that art, in this broad sense of a knowing-how ruling some poiesis, counts among the topics Aristotle treats in the Nicomachean Ethics, in particular in book VI. Aristotle’s treatise investigates the levels of arete, that is to say: of virtue or excellence of which human life is capable. Art in the sense of a knowing-how overseeing a production is one of those excellences. It appears

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among the dianoetic or intellectual excellences which are analyzed in book VI of the treatise through the establishment of a hierarchy among them into two levels: the level of excellences which involve a deliberation and the higher level of excellences which reach a science and are thus called epistemonic. These epistemonic excellences oversee a theoria or contemplation the referent of which in Aristotle—on this point in agreement with Plato—is characterized as being imperishable and inalterable, as forever being and ever since being what it is. Theoria, the referent of which has this characteristic, is itself divided into two levels: the level of episteme in the narrow sense, which only deals with beings of a determinate type (for example geometrical figures) and the higher level of sophia, which bears according to Aristotle on the principles of the whole of nature. Art does not appear among these higher dianoetic excellences. It appears in the lower level of deliberative excellences, those which do not oversee contemplation but a productive activity and which have as referents something perishable and alterable. To be more precise, art is at the lowest level of deliberative excellences. Considered as excellence, techne, i.e., the know-how of a good technites, is inferior to what Aristotle calls phronesis (generally translated by practical wisdom or prudence), which does not oversee the production of effects or works but what Aristotle calls praxis, a word he understands as simply meaning how to conduct one’s life. Praxis is the way people behave. Phronesis is the aptitude to discern in changing circumstances what is propitious to conducting one’s life in the right way. The analysis of the lecture courses Heidegger devoted to book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics before Being and Time shows that the articulation of his future analytic of Dasein between two poles—inauthenticity and authenticity—is to a very large extent inspired from the distinction Aristotle draws between the activity of poiesis enlightened by techne and the activity of praxis enlightened by phronesis. The latter according to Aristotle is for the sake of itself (ou eneka) to the extent that what matters for it is precisely the good conduct of life and not the production of this or that effect. Once reappropriated in a perspective which is no longer ethical but strictly ontological and centered on Dasein, the Aristotelian distinction is metamorphosed in Heidegger in the dichotomy between, on the one hand, Dasein’s inauthentic character of everyday concern in productive preoccupations which he shares with others, and, on the other,

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authenticity, which consists for the individual to assume properly and resolutely his mortal existence for the sake of himself. The examination of Heidegger’s interpretation of book VI of the Nichomachean Ethics, precisely because it is thus oriented, also reveals that within the framework of Dasein’s ontology, art in general belongs to the level of the inauthentic and could thus not have a fundamental and originary status. However, despite the confinement of art in inauthenticity, a major theme of Heidegger’s later meditation on the origin of art is already brought to light in these Marburg lectures. This theme is truth, understood not in the traditional sense of an adequacy between intellect and thing which would have its site in judgment, but in the initial sense of aletheia, understood as a disclosure which has its site in Dasein’s concrete intentionality, its relationship to the world. The Heideggerian reading of Aristotle in these lecture courses stresses that techne owes its dignity as dianoetic excellence to its capacity to disclose in the environing world materials, means and ways which are necessary for the bringing into work of the model that any good technites considers at the beginning of his activity of production. And since any disclosure according to Heidegger has its site in Dasein’s being-in-the-world, art thus understood, even at a lower level, has the status of being a modality of the capacity to disclose in which Dasein dwells and which permeates his whole relation to the world. It is in direct continuation of this reading of Aristotle that Heidegger claims when reflecting on the origin of the work of art that the origin of the work of art is art understood as the event of truth and that, in this event, a disclosure of a world occurs. This is what is already in seed, but at the lower level of everydayness, in the works preparing Being and Time. However, before the questioning on the origin of the work of art could grant this event of truth through art a completely eminent ontological rank as Heidegger did in the mid 1930s, he had in the meantime to introduce a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, ordinary techne and poiesis, which are strictly bound to everydayness and thus submitted to the realm of the “they” (of anybody) and in the position of fall compared to authenticity, and, on the other, of a techne and a poeisis of higher rank freed from any kind of inauthenticity. This distinction was absent from Being and Time which overall brought all techne, know-how of experts and art of artists, back to the inferior level of a pragmatic circumspection dealing with a daily environment.

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By contrast, this distinction is present in the famous Rectorate Address of 1933. Since this discourse clearly takes its inspiration from Plato’s Republic, it thereby invites those who investigate the ontogenesis of the problematics of the origin of the work of art, which was going to be developed soon after, to wonder what this questioning, however dated it is, owes to Heidegger’s long familiarity with Plato’s text. It is significant that the most detailed reappropriation of Aristotle Heidegger made during his teaching at Marburg was a prelude to an analysis of Plato’s Sophistes which was centered on the mode of life of the philosopher, the bios theoretikos. Hence the question of what Heidegger took over from Plato at the time of the gestation of his fundamental ontology. Considered from this angle, the ontogenesis of Heidegger’s question on the origin of the work of art forces us to recognize that all the works gravitating around Being and Time, either preparing it or immediately furthering it, tend not only to erase any kind of divergence—and they are perceivable—between Aristotle and Plato, but also to keep from Aristotle only what is susceptible to illuminate and confirm in existential terms the absolute precedence Plato grants to contemplative life, i.e., bios theoretikos, and the pursuit through this bios of an ultimate ontological insight. As mentioned above Aristotle’s mention of dianoetic excellences contains a hierarchy. One can rightly claim to admit that Aristotle follows Plato when he attributes to sophia, which concerns the being of the whole, a rank superior to episteme, which is always limited to determinate beings such as geometric figures. And a fortiori a higher dignity than phronesis, which is the highest deliberative excellence, but which always remains bound to particular circumstances. However, different from Plato, Aristotle is careful not to claim that sophia—with which only philosophers are concerned—renders null and void phronesis, i.e., the practical perspicacity available to anyone in the conduct of one’s existence. Shared by a plurality of individuals who interact and speak with each other, phronesis according to Aristotle is understood as a practical wisdom in situation and keeps all its dignity. Consequently, it is hard to see how the Platonic thesis that philosophers are exceptionally gifted to rule human affairs can be attributed to Aristotle. This is a Platonic, not an Aristotelian thesis. The corollary of this thesis, which Heidegger reappropriates, is also not Aristotelian: that a valuable city should be organized like a vast workshop where each would be a technician en-

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dowed with a strictly limited and definite expertise. This principle is totally opposed to the democratic way of life to which Aristotle granted a real dignity, since he presented Pericles as a model of phronesis. One has to acknowledge that there are not many echoes in Heidegger’s lecture courses of Marburg of these Aristotelian reservations toward Plato. This can be seen through some revealing quotations. At the opening of the first paragraph of his course on the Sophistes, Heidegger warns his audience that his recourse to Aristotle aims at preparing them for Plato, and more precisely for what is the true theme of the dialogue they will study: “Plato considers human Dasein in one of its most extreme possibilities, namely philosophical existence” (Heidegger 1992, 12; 1997a, 8). Some months earlier in a lecture course dedicated to Fundamental Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, Heidegger wrote about the Aristotelian definition of human being as “a living being endowed with speech” that the logos in Aristotle’s sense is accomplished in the delimitation of the essence of what is, of the ousia. He added: “existence, the radical fundamental possibility of Dasein, is for the Greeks bios theoretikos, life spent in pure contemplation” (Heidegger 2002, 44). For the Greeks! The shortcut is extremely significant if one considers that at that time Plato and Aristotle were practically alone among the Greeks to mobilize Heidegger’s attention and if it is accepted that Plato is at the origin of the attempt to demonstrate the precedence of bios theoretikos over any other way of life, and especially over the political way of life. Of itself, the formula “The Greeks” would be sufficient to prove that Heidegger at that time did not perceive any solution of continuity between Plato and Aristotle. And this is confirmed by the interpretation he gave of the other Aristotelian definition of human being: the human being is a zoon politikon. Heidegger takes into account this other definition and acknowledges that in Aristotle the political living being is a living being endowed with language. But when he does it, he is in strict conformity with Plato’s views, and not at all with the very text of Aristotle; for Heidegger is careful to claim that for Aristotle as for Plato the bios politikos where the living being, which speaks, moves and acts does not exceed the level of everyday concern and of what such a concern generates in terms of inauthenticity, i.e., the leveling realm of das Man, of the “they.” When a political agent—of course in Athenian democracy each citizen is a political agent—speaks in order to express his opinion on the decisions to be made for the sake of the community, it is not he who speaks but

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das Man, the “they” which speaks through him. Heidegger goes so far as to say that Aristotle, as well as Plato, was “in the most extreme opposition to what was going on around him,” (Heidegger 2002, 109) and considered that the speech expressed in the public space of the agora was trapped by “the immediate, fashion, idle talk and rumor” (Heidegger 2002, 108). One could ask how the radical ontological precedence Heidegger attributes to the bios theoretikos is compatible with the importance he granted to the Aristotelian analysis of praxis. To this, one has to answer that, aside from the relevance of Heidegger’s Platonization of the Aristotelian text, the incompatibility is only apparent and vanishes as soon as it is seen that it is one and the same existential ontologization which presides in Heidegger to his interpretation of contemplative life as the accomplishment of the most authentic possibility of Dasein’s existence and to his interpretation of praxis, in terms of a resolute existence for the sake of oneself. This ontologization of a particular type means that theoria, in the sense Plato and Aristotle gave it when they saw its culmination in the contemplative wisdom of the totality of the real, was insufficiently radical to the extent that, bearing on the immutable, the imperishable and the eternal, it moved away from mortality which is intrinsic to Dasein and thus sunk into inauthenticity. This ontologization also means that praxis in Aristotle’s sense was in fact insufficiently radical to the extent that it remained bound to interaction and dialogue in which mortals engage in everydayness. By claiming to overcome these insufficiencies Heidegger’s ontologization consists in collapsing the sight inherent to the highest contemplation on the exclusive axis of praxis now also reinterpreted in terms of existence as Dasein’s possibility to be for the sake of itself. This sight inherent to this existence for the sake of itself is the sight Heidegger will grant to Gewissen, understood as the most authentic intimate knowledge of Dasein. When Heidegger claimed in his Marburg lectures that the Aristotelian phronesis came close to this Gewissen, he was careful to add that the Gewissen should no longer be considered in ethical terms, i.e., as a moral consciousness in situation caring for good action with regard to this or that circumstance; Gewissen was to be ontologically purified. Thus purified, phronesis metamorphosed into Gewissen ceases to be the prudential and situated sight of the best decision to take: phronesis becomes the solitary silent sight by Dasein of the fact that its being is a radically mortal thrown project he alone has to assume resolutely.

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All this existential metamorphosis of the Platonic precedence of the sight of being allows us to understand that Heidegger could, some years after the publication of Being and Time but before his involvement with Nazism, expound his own conception of the essence of truth through a detailed analysis of the cave myth, which is the key text of the Republic. This analysis, which takes the essential of the first part of the lecture course of 1931-32 on“The Essence of Truth” (Heidegger 1997), interprets the stages of the Platonic narrative as successive phases of liberation toward the sight of light that the being of beings is. This sight is reappropriated in existential terms since the ultimate meaning of being is eventually the finite temporality which constitutes us. With regard to the ontogenesis of my problem, this lecture course represents an important stage in the putting into place of some central notions which Heidegger will use in his questioning on the origin of the work of art some years later. These central notions all gravitate around the principle that the essence of freedom consists in dedicating oneself to the sight of light, a sight which is itself inseparable from a project or a projection of being of which only Dasein, the human existent, is capable. What are these central notions? There is first the notion of origin which will take center stage in the questioning on the work of art. Pursuing the process of ontologization mentioned above, Heidegger writes: To become free means to understand Being as such and such an understanding lets first of all beings be as beings. It depends on human freedom whether beings become more beings or more unbeings and freedom measures its extent according to the original character, the breadth and the decisiveness of the tie to beings as they are and to the sight of the Being of these beings as it is, what understands itself only as Dasein, moved back in the isolation and thrownness of his historical provenance and future. The more original the tie [to this sight of the Being of beings] the greater the proximity to beings (Heidegger 1997b, 60).

The second important notion introduced by this text is the explicit reformulation in existential terms of the Platonic concept of the philosopher-king. Commenting on the passage of the Republic, where Plato deals with the return to the cave of those who have contemplated light, Heidegger writes:

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The authentic guardians of the Miteinandersein of human beings in the unity of the polis must of necessity be people who philosophize... The dominating of the state and the ordering of this domination must be governed by people who philosophize and who, on the basis of the deepest and widest knowledge—a knowledge which freely questions—, establish the measure and the rule... As philosophizing they must of necessity be in a position of knowing with clarity and rigor what human being is and how it is about this Being and capacity to be (1997b, 100).

The third notion concerns the ontological status of the work of art. In the context of his commentary on Plato, Heidegger for the first time grants art, more precisely what he calls “great poetry”—Sophocles’ poetry in particular—the power to manifest “the internal power of the human understanding of Being, of the sight of light.” He adds that in order to understand this, one has to cease “considering the problem of art as a problem of aesthetics” (1997b, 64). It is remarkable that, in this twofold gesture of the ontological celebration of “great art” and of the overcoming of aesthetics, Plato is here again the one who inspires Heidegger: in the second part of the course (dedicated to Theaetetus), Heidegger connects the beautiful in the Platonic sense to Dasein’s aptitude of “making being manifest, discovering it and thus letting the truth happen.” In the same context Heidegger writes that the beautiful as understood by the Greeks does not pertain to aesthetic enjoyment. It is rather, he says, a determination concerning the Dasein of human beings. To this Dasein, unquietness (Unheimlichkeit) also belongs, of which Sophocles speaks at the beginning of the second chorus of Antigone: “There are many things which are deina [worth admiring, but at the same time worth fearing], but nothing is more uncanny than human beings” (1997b, 198). According to Heidegger, human condition in its authenticity is disquieting or uncanny to the extent that it leaves the securing quietness of daily concerns in order to confront its most proper, i.e., its own mortality. Besides expressing without any echo of the Aristotelian reading of the Tragics a blunt amalgamation of the Platonic and Sophoclean texts, these statements suggest that Plato’s diatribes against artists and spectators of their works result not from a recusation of “great art,” but on the contrary, from the rejection in the name of an eminent techne granted to the unconcealment of being of what in the artist’s works appeals to aesthetic enjoyment.

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1.2 The Reappropriation of the Greeks in the Fundamental Ontology Broadened to the Dasein of a People Two years later, the Rectorate Address puts this eminent techne, this great art, at the center stage of the ontological disclosure. In the steps of Heidegger’s existential reformulation of the Platonic precedence of theoria, this discourse starts by reminding us that the Greeks understood theoria as “the highest accomplishment of genuine praxis.” Heidegger introduces a significant innovation when in one gesture he closely connects this theoria understood as a sight of being by Dasein with a techne of Promethean size. Heidegger quotes a verse from Aeschylus’ Prometheus: “techne is much weaker than necessity.” Whereas in the context of Aeschylus’ tragedy this means that any human know-how has its limits, Heidegger does not hesitate to translate the term techne by the German word Wissen and to read in Aeschylus’ verse not an appeal to moderation but a celebration of the challenge imposed by the overpower of destiny and by the ontological concealment involved in this overpower. Thus techne, which has become now Promethean, is put to the level of the highest theoria, the one to which the metaphysician dedicates himself, and is called to preside to a setting into work of the same rank: the setting into work of a State of a new type, the description of which in the Rectorate Address is clearly inspired by Plato’s Republic and in no way, as one can surmise, by Pericles’ democratic City. This Promethean techne constitutes the dominating tone of Heidegger’s philosophical remarks on art which will appear in the first lecture course on Hölderlin and his course Introduction to Metaphysics before the three texts on the origin of the work of art. I have shown elsewhere (Taminiaux 1989, 255-278) that the articulation of Heidegger’s first interpretation of Hölderlin focused on the poems The Rhine and Germania derives, in its structure, from fundamental ontology and thus from the theoretical project to which Sein und Zeit belongs, in the sense that this first reading emphasizes the contrast between falling everydayness and Dasein’s resolute authenticity. However, fundamental ontology initially was centered on one individual who is the Dasein always mine. Hence the major question: “who is Dasein?” By contrast, in 1933, the question becomes: “Who are we?” The “we” is the German people to whom the poet Hölderlin is supposed to speak. From the Dasein always mine, from any single existent who can say “I” and who has his own temporality, we have moved to the unicity of the

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Dasein of a people and the central question now is: “How is it about the Being of this people itself?” (Heidegger 1999, 22). According to this expansion of the notion of Dasein to the existence of a people, we see in Heidegger’s reading a semantic modification of the existentials which the existential analytics had isolated some years before. The fundamental Stimmung (attunement) in Being and Time is anxiety. Now, since the Dasein in question in this reading is the Dasein of the German people, the Grundstimmung suited to the being of this people must be different from the attunement which was suited to the being of each individual, while keeping the same function of ontological revelator as anxiety. Heidegger claims that Hölderlin’s poems are carried by a fundamental tone suited to the being of the Dasein of the German people and which is the mourning for the sacred: gods have fled. Heidegger grants this Grundstimmung the function of revealing ontologically the Dasein of the German people. It reveals its truth to this people and it opens for it the “disposition to be ready” (Bereitschaft) to accept the return of the divine (Heidegger 1999, 103). Consequently, the emphasis shifts from the finite historicity of the individual toward the destiny of a single people: “The being of fatherland, i.e., the historial Dasein of the people, experienced as the authentic and unique Being, from which its fundamental stance toward being in totality grows and conquers its articulation” (Heidegger 1999, 121-22). This is the vocabulary of Being and Time but broadened to the Dasein of a people. Now if everyone is capable of his own Dasein as individual, not everyone could be capable of the Dasein of a people! Only a few individuals who are creators are at the level of this broadened Dasein. This is the reason why Heidegger writes: The Grundstimmung—and this means the truth of the Dasein of a people—is originally instituted by the poet [Hölderlin for Germany]. But the being so disclosed is understood and articulated and thus open for the first time by the thinker. And the being thus understood is set in the last and first seriousness of beings, i.e., in the decisive historical truth through the fact that the people is brought to itself as a people. And this happens through the creation by the creator of state of the state which is decisive for the essence of this people. However, this whole event has its own times and thus its own sequence of times... These three creative forces of the historical Dasein bring about that to which we can ascribe greatness. (Heidegger 1999, 144)

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The course of Introduction to Metaphysics takes place in the continuation of this broadened fundamental ontology (Heidegger 1953). Heidegger gave this lecture course the same year he drafted the first version of the essay on the origin of the work of art. Furthering the texts mentioned above and as in the course on Hölderlin, the Introduction to Metaphysics stresses that there are three modalities in the disclosure of the historial Dasein of a people which are meant for the poet, the creator of a state and the great thinker. Such is the ontogenesis of the notions which are going to articulate the thematic questioning on the origin of the work of art: the historial Dasein of a people, the struggle at the heart of this broadened Dasein between concealment and disclosure, the setting-into-work which is up to what the people can be and is taken over by the poet, the thinker and the creator of a State. The destiny of this broadened Dasein imposes, according to Heidegger, a decision for the sake of Being and against the appearance in which everydayness remains. Moreover the very notion of origin plays a determining role in the Introduction to Metaphysics. At the beginning of the course, Heidegger reminds his audience of the fundamental question of metaphysics:“why is there being and not rather nothing?” And he adds that it belongs to that question to have repercussion on the questioner and that thus this question “has its ground in a leap through which man thrusts away all the previous security, whether real or imagined, of his life.” He adds: “the leap in this questioning opens up its own source—with this leap the question arrives at its own ground. We call such a leap, which opens up its own source, the original source or origin , the finding of one’s own ground” (Heidegger 1953, 4-5; 1959, 5-6). The origin in Heidegger’s sense is at this time a sudden leap through which the Dasein of a people is supposed to confront what is most fundamental in its being.

2. The First Elaboration of the Questioning on the Origin of the Work of Art This first elaboration probably dating from 1931-1932 was only published in 1989 (Heidegger 1989, 5-22), edited by Hermann Heidegger, the philosopher’s son. It is accompanied by an introductory note in  The citations of this work have been translated by John Noel Turner and

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which the editor reminds readers that, according to the Postscript which accompanied the publication of the last version of the questioning on the origin of the work art in Holzwege in 1949, his father’s considerations on the subject did not claim to “resolve” the enigma of art, but only to make it “visible.” There is a certain part of retrospective illusion in this note. If the first elaboration indeed contains signs of an attention to the enigma, these are dominated by a completely different thematic: the thematic of the call addressed to the German Dasein to assume resolutely the project of Being properly itself. It is in this sense that Heidegger writes at the very beginning of this first elaboration that for him “one thing only” matters: “Namely, in spite of all appreciation of that which has long been thought and said of an essential determination of art, to prepare a changed fundamental position of our Dasein toward art” (Heidegger 1989, 5). The possessive adjective used by Heidegger is significant of the broadening of his problematic to the Dasein of a people. It is by virtue of this broadening that the questioning on the origin of the work of art will be able to exclude from its field any borrowing to accepted views and thus to concentrate on the conditions of a German return of Greece. According to Heidegger these accepted views regarding art suffer from a real ontological deficiency to the extent that they reduce the work of art either to being only the result of a lived experience (Erlebnis) of the artist awakening in the spectator this other Erlebnis of aesthetic enjoyment, or to being only objects around which historians, art critics, museum curators and amateurs busy themselves. In both cases, one does not recognize that the “authentic” work—and only “great art” has this quality—is an epoch-making event and is endowed with the totally inaugural power of historization which is accompanied by a rupture with accepted views. In this regard it is striking to note that the continuity with the problematic of Being and Time imposes itself right away at the beginning of the questioning, to the extent that the separation between everydayness and authenticity is what rules the rejection of current views. At close inspection it turns out indeed that the goal is to give back its rights to the Being, in the verbal sense, of the work, to its working character. If, in order to do that, one has to free oneself from the habitual reducing of the beingwork to the level either of the being-product or of the being-object, it is not for subtracting the work from any relationship but to take it away been provided by the author, Jacques Taminiaux.

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from a certain type of manifestation which concerns publicness. What characterized the inauthentic mode of existing in everydayness in Being and Time was precisely the submission to publicness, to the realm of the “they,” to all-purpose clichés; and it was by opposition to all this that the indeclinable individuation of the Being proper to Dasein was described. Following this contrast and transposing it Heidegger can now write: “To the ‘public,’ where there is one, it has only the relation that it destroys the public. And in this destructive force the greatness of an artwork measures itself ” (Heidegger 1989, 8).

2.1 The work of art as work It remains to be seen whether this continuity is confirmed when we examine the two features characterizing the being-work of the work: the setting-up (Aufstellung) of a world and the setting forth (Herstellung) of an earth. With regard to the setting-up of a world, the continuity is confirmed in that the world established by the work is presented as something “uncanny [Unheimische]” which is not only “more real [seiender, “beinger”] than any of the tangible present at hand things in which we believe ourselves in everyday life to be at home” but which also has a function of “rejection of the usual presence at hand” (Heidegger 1989, 9). It is thus a reformulation of the opposition emphasized by Being and Time between the disquieting character of the world in the proper and authentic sense and the securing character of everyday world. It is thus in fundamental ontology that the ontogenesis of the questioning on the work of art lies. However, since for some years fundamental ontology has moved beyond the limits of individual Dasein to bear on the Dasein of a people, these echoes of existential analytic are intermingled with the echoes of some German precursors for whom Ancient Greece had the rank of a paradigm. Like Hegel and his friends, Schelling and Hölderlin, like Schiller before them, Heidegger greets the example of “great art” among the Greeks. And like these precursors, Heidegger argues in a metaphysical perspective. Like them lastly, he appeals to types and not to designatable works, for one seeks in vain, when he grants to “the building of a certain temple of Zeus, or the putting up and erecting of a certain statue of Apollo” (Heidegger, 1989, 8-9) the function of establishing a world,

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which designatable work he had in mind. More precisely, in continuity with the chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit on the “Religion of art” which for Hegel was the religion of the Greeks, Heidegger grants a theophanic function to the Greek works which are supposed to establish a world: “Such setting up as establishing is consecration and praising. To consecrate means to ‘bless’ in the sense that in the workly offering the holy as holy opens up and the God gets wrested into the open of his presence.” (1989, 9) By virtue of this theophanic setting-up, the world gains a verbal and active status: it “worlds” in the manner of a “guiding escort” which “never comes upon us as object. Rather, indicating, it holds our doings enraptured in a structure of reference out of which the beckoning grace and striking fate of the Gods arrives and—remains absent” (Heidegger 1989, 9). The first feature of the being-work of the work, through this contrast between worlding and innerworldly, between the non-familiarity of the former and the familiar character of the latter, concretizes at the level of a “we” the opposition Being and Time stressed between everydayness and the disquieting character of one’s own Being. How about the second feature, the Herstellung of an earth? Herstellung in German sometimes means production, sometimes setting forth (or even restoration). Heidegger makes use of these two meanings but he intends to emphasize the second. Heidegger acknowledges that “every work, insofar as it is, is set forth out of stone, wood, ore, color, tone, and language” and that“in production utilization this is called the matter. It is brought into a form.” He then claims that this conceptual doublet matter-form inherited from Plato and Aristotle involves an “interpretation of the Being of beings [which] is nevertheless not only not transparent, [but] not even fashioned out of the experience of the artwork as artwork at all” (Heidegger 1989, 10-11). It is here that Heidegger brings to the fore the second meaning of the word Herstellung. He writes: Just as the work towers up in its world it also sinks itself back in the massiveness and weight of the stone, in the hardness and splendor of the ore, in the firmness and pliability of the wood, in the light and dark of the color, in the sounding out of the tone, and in the naming power of the word. Is all this only and chiefly matter, which just gets picked up from somewhere, used, and consumed in the making—and then through the forming no longer appears as mere matter? Does

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To produce an earth is to restitute, to give this manifestation back to itself, to manifest its “unparalleled fullness [unűberbietbaren Fűlle]” as “a ground which, because essentially and always self sealing off, is an abyss” (Heidegger 1989,11). Such are the two features constitutive of the being-work of the work. Since the world is “an unveiling escort” while the earth is a “self-sealing off,” their relation could only be conflictual: “World is against earth and earth against world. They are in contest [Streit]” (Heidegger 1989,12). This conflict is at the heart of the work. The work is what animates the conflict by establishing a correspondence between “the self-squandering of the sealing itself off of the earth” and the parallel rigor of a “feature” which, through “the countour, sketch, and outline,” in short through a “form,” which is no longer the mastery of a material, succeeds in drawing into the open the abysmal character of the earth (Heidegger 1989, 12). This is by virtue of which the work “grounds” and “opens” a “leeway” (Spielraum) in which “the earth, world-like is sealed off and the world, earth-like, is open.” This leeway, Heidegger adds, appealing once more to the paradigmatic example of the Greek temple, is the “openness of the There, in which things and humans come to stand, in order to stand it [bestehen]” (12). On this point one could be tempted to agree with Heidegger’s son that the description I just summarized, through its insistence on the overlapping over each other of opening and closing, invites to pay attention to an enigma. But the invitation is short lived as soon as it appears, always on the example of the Greek temple, that the There open by the work is defined as that “in which a people comes to its own—i.e., comes into the ordaining [fügende] power [Macht] of its God” (Heidegger 1989, 12). The chiasma of opening and closing thus calls for less a meditation than a conquest of oneself by the broadened Dasein of a people. It is thus the thematic of resolute selfhood which prevails over the thematic of the enigma as is shown by the function assigned in parallel to the word of the great poet: thanks to him “a people finds its great concepts of being as a whole predetermined for it” (Heidegger 1989, 13). This is confirmed shortly after by the introduction of a motif which will play a determining role in the following of this first version of the questioning on the origin of art: the motif of decision (Entscheidung).

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The decision in question is imposed by the dominance throughout the history of Christian West of a conception of art inherited from Plato and which granted to works the function of representing something, not in the sense of a servile imitation of what is given ready to hand, but in the sense of a symbolization. The reference to the Greek temple and to the theophany inaugurated jointly by the Aufstellung of a world and the Herstellung of an earth cannot be dissociated in Heidegger from a polemic against Darstellung, representation. Of course it is an ontological polemic. Not content to hold the work of art as a material dressed by virtue of a form, and thus to duplicate the work in hyle and morphe as any tool, the conception Heidegger criticizes suffers from intensifying the drawback of the duplication by granting to the form of the artistic product the additional role of referring as an allegorical imitation, to a reality situated elsewhere. It follows that the work is only the unreal appearance of a genuine being of which it is only a weakened echo, a derived copy. Whatever may have been the modalities of the Darstellung throughout the history of the West, whether the function of symbolizing the invisible, the intelligible, the supra-sensible, the supernatural granted to the work or conversely the function of symbolizing the visible, in all cases the work is held as secondary compared to a genuine being which is considered primordial. Against that Heidegger rebels: But the artwork does not represent anything—and this for the sole and simple reason that it has nothing that it should represent. For while the work in the contesting of the contest of world and earth ever opens this contesting in its way, the work wins for the first time the open, the clearing in whose light what is as such encounters us as on the first day or—if become everyday-like—transformed” (Heidegger 1989, 13).

By contrast to the unreality and the secondary character granted to works of art by the Darstellung so dear to the West since the time it claimed to vindicate the legacy of Plato, the Greek temple is there to prove the contrary: The temple, which towers up on a promontory or in a rocky valley, the statue, which stands there in the holy district—these works amid everything else—the sea and land, the springs and trees, eagles and snakes—are not simply at best present at hand also. Rather,

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Jacques Taminiaux they keep the midst engaged in the lit up leeway of the appearing of things. They are realer than any thing because each thing can only first show itself as a being in that open that is won by the work (Heidegger 1989, 15).

It thus follows that the work, far from being subjected to an external norm,“itself is standard of being and unbeing [Unseienden]” (Heidegger 1989, 15). In Humanisme de l’autre homme, Emmanuel Levinas notes that, in Heidegger’s conception of the history of being, biblical verses do not seem to be entitled to be quoted and he thus raises the following question: “Have the Holy Scriptures, read and commented in the West, inclined the Greek writing of philosophers or are they united to it only teratologically?” (Levinas 1972, 96). Upon a closer reading of the text I analyze here, the answer is that Heidegger presents the Western heritage of Platonism as a teratology, i.e., as a monstrosity. According to the proclaimed ambition of this text which is “to prepare a changed fundamental position of [the German] Dasein towards art” (Heidegger 1989, 5), the transformation in question imposes to totally disregard the long dominance of the Darstellung which is inherent to this heritage where Platonic inspiration and commentary of Holy Scriptures intermingle. What Levinas called “transcendence” is thus totally disregarded. The careful reader, surprised by the vehemence of this recusation of Darstellung, can with good reason wonder whether Heidegger’s argumentation does not come close to contradiction. If the Greek work around which the argumentation gravitates is “the standards of being and non-being,” how can it escape the duplication real-unreal which is blamed on Darstellung? More generally, if such a work does not draw from “common reality,” but produces “shock and refutation” (Heidegger 1989, 15), is the duplication real-unreal, against which the polemic is directed, abolished or simply displaced and transposed in another duplication: the anti-thesis of the common and the authentic? Be it as it may, since this polemic is supposed to contribute to the transformation of the German Dasein’s attitude toward art, how can it escape the realm of imitation which it denounces in all respects, since it takes as its model an Ancient work which should inspire the German return of the Greek beginning?

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2.2 Art as the Origin of the Work Whatever these difficulties may be, the vehemence of the polemic, its appeal to a“decision” suggests that the voluntarist thematic of resolution wins over the attention to the enigma. This is confirmed by the second part of Heidegger’s analysis. It begins with a question: “Why is strife the essence of art?” To which it can be answered: “The work-being of the work has the fundamental trait of contesting because and insofar as the work is a work of ‘art’ [‘der’ Kunst].” This only pushes the question further: what is thus “art”? (Heidegger 1989, 18) For fear of reducing art to a simple multi-purpose label, one has to start from the essential features of the being-work of the work and move back toward art as what founds them and is at their origin. Reminding us that the work opens the There, the Da, “the midst of the open in whose clearing which is as such stands in and shows itself,” and that “this open contains the awakening of a world together with the sealing itself off of the earth,” Heidegger adds: “while this intimacy of the open conflict of the self-concealing and the self-unconcealing occurs, that which up to now was reckoned the real becomes manifest as unbeing. It comes to light—that means into the open—that up to now hiding and pretense and distortion of being prevailed. What thus occurs in the contesting—the opening up of the openness of the conflict of the unconcealed and concealed, the emerging from hiding and pretense—this by itself decreed occurring is the occurring of that which we call truth. For the essence of truth does not consists in the agreement of a sentence with a thing. Rather, truth is this fundamental occurring of the opening up of the openness of what is as such. That is why the concealed and the self-concealing (the secret) essentially belong to truth just as much as do the hiding and pretense and distortion—un-truth” (Heidegger 1989, 16). If this event of aletheia is what is fundamental in the strife of the conflict world-earth, the answer to the question “what is art?” readily follows: “The setting to work of truth is the essence of art” (1989, 16). As presented, the bursting open of aletheia which characterizes the essence of art according to Heidegger has enigmatic features: what is more enigmatic than a truth which makes undecidable the discrimination between secret and sham? One could believe that the attention to enigma bounces back. In reality, however, it is as if the insistence on the undecidable only intensified the decisionist appeal to the resolution of being oneself by cutting through at the heart

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of the entanglement between concealment and unconcealment. What follows in this analysis of art as origin of the work does not gravitate around the meditation on an enigma but on a historical project. The analytic of Dasein defined this historical project as a thrown project, the authenticity of which pertained to the resolute assumption of its ekstatic temporality with regard to the everyday fixation on the present. Following this analytic now broadened to the Dasein of a people, Heidegger tries to make it clear “why there must be work in order for truth to occur” (Heidegger 1989, 17). Some quotations will suffice to manifest this furthering. Heidegger writes: If truth first comes to work with the work and in the work and is not present at hand anywhere beforehand, then it must become. From where does the opening up of the openness of what is come? From the nothing, say? Indeed, if by not-being [Nichtseienden] that presence at hand is meant which, just like the allegedly true being, was refuted and shocked by the work. The truth is never read off from this presence at hand. Much more does the openness of what is occur while it is projected, poetized. All art, in essence, is poetry—i.e., the blazing up of that open in which everything is otherwise than usual. By virtue of the poetizing projection the usual and the up-to-now turn to unbeing (Heidegger 1989, 17) .

It is impossible not to recognize in these formulations, in their insistence to invert signs—ordinary being becoming non-being—and to emphasize the inherent rupture from historization, the echo and the transposition into the work of art of the problematic which was central to the analytic of Dasein: the unveiling project breaking up with the inauthentic in order to gain access to the sight of the most proper capacity to be. There are other quotes. Since the word Dichtung designates in German most of the time the art of language which is poetry, Heidegger is careful to note that he understands this word etymologically as an activity of composition, what the Greeks called poiesis, thus a poietic project broader than the one of poetry in the narrow sense of a linguistic art. “Nevertheless the language work, poetry in the narrower sense, has an exemplary position in the whole of art” (Heidegger 1989, 17). This is the occasion for Heidegger, in order to grasp more closely the meaning of his definition of the essence of art as Dichtung, on the one hand to reject the current views of specialists who judge the quality of works

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with regard to their power of “expression” and on the other to propose against this notion of expression his own conception of the essence of language. Heidegger writes: But this boundlessly correct and yet essenceless characterization of art as expression does not accord at all with language. It is true that language serves for communication, conversation, and agreement. But it is neither only nor primarily a vocal and written expression of that which is to be imparted, whether of the true or the untrue—i.e., whether of manifest or disguised being as manifest or disguised. Language does not just impart the manifest and pass it along. Rather, before this and properly it is the essence of language to raise the being as a being in to the open for the first time ... This naming and saying is a projecting in which the being is announced as what is open (1989, 18).

It is impossible not to recognize that this formulation furthers the analytic of Dasein which, when treating logos (“discourse”) as an existential, granted it the primordial function of an ontological revelation and not of a communication with others. Now as before, to speak is not primarily to speak to somebody but to speak of being in its being and eventually to talk to oneself of one’s authentic capacity to be. Emmanuel Levinas has dedicated himself to reverse this marginalization of communication—the ground of ethics but also of politics—in Totality and Infinity: he sees the face to face with the other as the primordial site of discourse, tearing discourse away from the apophantic and thematic project of discourse and rehabilitating expression as the “manifestation kath’auto of the face of the other” (Levinas 1961, 37). However, since Dasein is no longer of an individual but of a people, it is now incumbent on this people to transpose the existential problematic of discourse. This is the reason why Heidegger specifies in these terms the nature of the ontological projection which defines according to him the essence of language: “The projecting saying is poetry, the saga of world and earth and therewith the leeway of the nearness and distance of the Gods. The primal language (Ursprache) is such saga (Sage) as the primal poetry of a people in which its world rises up and its earth as its own begins to seal itself off.” Thus broadened to a people, the existential problematic of discourse has now its site in the language of a people and the ontological projection this language enjoys. Just as the acute point of discourse in Being and Time was the call individual

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Dasein addressed to its resolution to be itself, the language of a people is accomplished in the call it addresses to the people to be resolutely and exclusively itself. Heidegger writes: Truth as openness is always openness of the There in which all being and unbeing stands, out of which every being as the sealing itself off takes itself back. And so the ‘There’ itself remains rooted in this abyss. Nevertherless, this ‘There’—how is it? Who takes it upon himself to be this ‘There’? Answer: man—not as individual, also not as community. These two ways of human-being are only possible at all if man previously takes on the There—i.e., stands in the midst of being as being and unbeing—i.e., stands with Being as such. This way of being the There we call history. When man is the There—i.e., is historical—he becomes a people. (Heidegger 1989, 19)

It is useless to seek in these considerations on language, on the legend of the world and the earth, on the people, on history, any opening to what linguistics, philology, mythology, sociology, historiography could teach us on these themes. In the wake of fundamental ontology, they have become the object of such an ontological epuration that they are radically subtracted to these disciplines just as the work of art was beforehand subtracted to the specialists of art and just as the analytic of Dasein wanted to escape any psychology or anthropology. In these conditions, the refusal of any positivity is no less than the refusal of any transcendence. In both cases, what justifies such a refusal is a possibility to be which is equal to none and rebellious to any generality, improper and inauthentic by definition. Heidegger writes about the There which a people attempts to be: “This There itself is never something general—rather, ever a this and a singular [ein einziges]” (Heidegger 1989, 20). Just as before Dasein at each time mine was individuated through its confrontation with its proper death, the Dasein of a singular people to which Heidegger speaks has no other historicity than the one of a thrown project opting for being despite the non-being which threatens it. It is at any rate on the axis of the resolution to be one’s own properly and exclusively that this first elaboration of the question of the origin of the work of art concludes. Heidegger writes: “Knowing about the essence is just knowing as decision. In the question about art, the decision runs thus: Is art essential to us? Is it an origin and with that an endowing start to our history? A start or only still a supplement that gets

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brought along as ‘expression’ of the present at hand and pursued further for ornamentation and amusement, for relaxation and excitement? Are we in the nearness of the essence of art as origin or are we not? And if we are not in the nearness of the origin, do we know this or do we not know it and just stagger on in art management? If we do not know it, then the first thing is to raise it up to knowledge. For clarity as to who we are and who we are not is already the decisive leap into the nearness of the origin. Such nearness alone guarantees a truly grounded historical Dasein as genuine autochthony on this earth” (Heidegger 1989, 22). It is impossible to understand the alternative thus formulated both in terms of knowledge and in terms of will as something other than the reminder of the very program of the analytic of Dasein: to be clear about who Dasein is and what it wants to be by contrast to what it is not. Heidegger wrote at the beginning: what we are seeking, the origin, we must already have it, and what we have we must first seek. In reality, upon closer reading of this text, one realizes that what matters, by virtue of this circle, is not to dispossess ourselves in an enigmatic and mysterious origin, but to find ourselves: brought to its origin, the work, even if it illuminates all things differently than ordinarily, has nothing surprising: however inaugural it is claimed to be, the work does not bring about strange surprises, for what is otherwise than ordinary is in fact nothing strange. The only surprise involved is to be understood in the literal sense of an overtaking, of a supplementary taking hold that the Dasein of a people is called to exercise over itself. Seeking the origin is simply taking again hold of oneself. Translated from the French by Dominique Poncelet

Works Cited Heidegger, Martin. 1953. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer. ———. 1959. An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ———. 1962. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1989. “Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerks: Erste Ausarbeitung.” Heidegger Studies 5: 5-22.

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———. 1992. Platon: Sophistes. Gesamtausgabe 19. Ed. I. Schüssler. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1997a. Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1997b. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Gesamtausgabe 34. Ed. H. Mörchen. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1999. Hölderlins Hymne “Germanien” und “Der Rhein.” Gesamtausgabe 39. Ed. S. Ziegler. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 2000. Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 1910-1976. Gesamtausgabe 16. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 2002. Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie. Gesamtausgabe 18. Ed. M. Michalski. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Kisiel, Theodore. 1995. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: California University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1972. Humanisme de l’autre homme. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. Taminiaux, Jacques. 1989. Lectures de l’ontologie fontamentale: essais sur Heidegger. Grenoble: J. Millon.

2 Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism & Philosophy Towards a ‘Non-Prosaic’ Conception of Consciousness

Stephen Watson “I recognize in no uncertain terms that surrealism is the only poetic movement of the first half of the twentieth century.” Sartre (1978, 190-1) Phenomenology is “the only philosophy which lives.” Bataille (1988, 8) “Perhaps in our uncertain space we are closer to those who excavate: to Nietzsche (instead of Husserl) to Klee (instead of Picasso). Breton belongs to that family.” Foucault (1997, 171) “The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make painting both sign and object.” Sartre (1978, 29n)

T

he relationship between philosophy and surrealism remains unwieldy. At stake, to use Blanchot’s words is a “strange plurality” (1992, 408). The significance of this plurality, moreover, has been difficult to evaluate. Seen from either perspective each is the site of a certain interruption. As Blanchot has noted, discussions of the issue tend typically to restrict such evaluations to an explication of sources, Breton’s readings of Hegel, for example, or his relation to Bergson. The resulting analyses not only rarely rise to the level of adjudication in themselves but also rarely engage the status of surrealism as a theoretical ‘source’ for other matters, as far ranging as accounts of the primitive in anthropology, or the unconscious in psychoanalysis,

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or even the account of the sacred in theology. We are at risk of losing, thereby, the debates and dialectics through which surrealism might be more than simply a historical fact. Granted the complexity of these relations, it is understandable how such debates (not only between artists, but artists and critics, the ‘silence’ of artistic practices and the ‘noise’ of theoretical discourse) go largely unexplored. And, like other such lacunae, the historical effects of surrealism would thus remain largely ‘unconscious’ in our accounts. The relation between Picasso and Klee, for example, has similarly been described as both classical to, and inherently dialectical within, the history of aesthetic modernism; it involves a clash between a vigorously inventive systematic, engaged practice and its ‘cooler’ more labyrinthian explorative demurrals. Granted the diversity of these painters’ works and the immensity of their impact, any final appraisal concerning such a dialectic inevitably itself remains conditional. Adding to such internal dialectics of artistic posture and commitment, the complications of ‘philosophy’ only further underdetermines the event—an event that involves not only the ‘differends’ of theory, but those of criticism and the dialectics of both theory and praxis. To say all this is doubtless to say something about the uncomfortable relations not only between philosophy and art (or at least the painterly), but philosophy and poetry (or at least the literary). Ultimately, however, it forces us to confront the difficult space that separates the ‘hieroglyphics’ of the textual and the ‘propositional.’ In all of these cases, like much of the impact of avante-garde, the practices at stake seemed inevitably to question the contingency of the distinctions themselves. In the case of philosophy and writing, these issues (as well as the troubling status of surrealism) were certainly thematic by the time of Sartre’s What is Literature? (where, not incidentally, the dialectic between Picasso and Klee is likewise at work). Moreover, as will become evident, Sartre’s protocols form something of a legacy for the interpretation of these matters. Strikingly however, in an opening chapter (“What is Writing?”) Picasso’s “Guernica,” often cited as an exemplar of political engagement, becomes for Sartre a certain exemplar of the painter’s muteness: “does any one think that it won over a single heart of the Spanish cause?” (Sartre 1978, 5). Having invoked Merleau-Ponty’s claim that no quale is “so bare that it is not permeated with signification,” Sartre states that in the Guernica“something is said that can never quite be heard and that would take an infinity of words to express.” This infinity however

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speaks to a crucial problem within the Sartrean text. For Sartre, this “infinity” spoke less to a wealth to be mined (as it had already in Kant) than a limitation concerning the work of art’s conceptual determinability—and not only relevance but also reference. Kant himself claimed that we are compelled within this ‘infinity’ to ascribe reality to an aesthetic predicate “as if it were a property of things” (Kant 1987, 56). The problem that Sartre’s text will raise is prefigured in his citation of Merleau-Ponty, where this ‘adventure of the aesthetic dialectic’ had already begun. The question for Merleau-Ponty had emerged as to the originality (and difference) between the said and the unsaid, the relation between the sensible and the intelligible. In the problem of the painterly concept, however, Merleau-Ponty had encountered not simply the problem of finite sensoriality, i.e., not simply the metaphysical relation between the sensible and the intelligible but, in their difference, the limitations of that strict distinction—and in the issue of their significative difference, precisely different domains of intelligibility itself. In this silence that speaks otherwise than the said, Merleau-Ponty argued—and would increasingly in the wake of Sartre’s citation—there lurks a polymorphism in what Kant called the schematism, the event in which Kant argued transcendental imagination linked intuition and concepts (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 326 f.) As Blanchot saw, there lay lurking equally in this difference a certain alterity before the demands of strict theoretical determinability. Schelling, who had linked this difference to art and the unconscious, wrote that a certain surpassing or surprise, literally an ‘overtaking’ (Über-raschung) occurs in the work of art that challenged the Kantian honorifics attending cognitively determinate discourse (Erkenntnis: Schelling 1978, 221 f.). Indeed Merleau-Ponty was willing to say that in this moment words surprise me and“teach me my thoughts,” calling into question the simple link between reflection and the intention to communicate (vouloir dire). In linking himself to Merleau-Ponty’s more expressive archive in 1948, Sartre never saw the objections that would sink his simple opposition between the silent and the said. Nevertheless, the invocation of such a ‘polymorphism’ seemed nonphenomenological in the classical, Husserlian sense, where paintings are simply iteratively available as pre-linguistic phenomenological Sinn—not ‘differently’ but restrictly: the painterly Sinn remains, unlike the mathematical, bound to time and place, and even materiality. Sartre’s account of the imaginary follows Husserlian premises: the imaginary

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is an immanent object strictly distinct from the real. Correspondingly, the semantics of “What is Literature?” strictly distinguishes between meaning and use in precisely this regard: designation or real reference and imaginary reference are two strictly distinct significative “layers”. While from the outset Merleau-Ponty had rendered this distinction problematic, Sartre cites Merleau-Ponty only to note that the painterly (like the sensible) is significative—though for Sartre in strictly distinct (but analogous) manners (Sartre 1978, 4-5). As his 1940 work on the Imagination had declared, the image is an analgon but precisely an analgon of the real upon which it remains always semantically and ontologically parasitic. In What is Literature?, Sartre again insists on the difference, the hierarchy and its valorization. The writer’s vocation is that of responsibility, as it were the existential speech-act of engagement. The painter and the poet undertake the exploration of their media, which becomes like the image, merely an object in itself. Here the writer’s responsibility is absolute and absolutely distinct from the irresponsibility of painting. The writer’s silence is not different, a difference among modi significandi, but rather an (irresponsible) refusal to speak (Sartre 1978, 19). Hence Sartre claims, one has the “right” to ask “Why have you spoken of this rather than that” (Sartre 1978, 19). Except in certain precisely ‘exceptional cases’; while for the painter the color is a thing, Klee has transgressed the protocols or limits of the painterly imaginary: “The greatness and error of Klee lies in his attempt to make a painting both sign and object” (Sartre 1978, 29 n.) The writer does not (analogously) explore words, does not allow language to resonate, rather the prose writer“makes use of words” (Sartre 1978, 13). And this ‘prosaic’ use removes the writer from the poetics and the imaginary of the avante-garde leaving the writer’s discourse, meaning and use—or responsibilities—untouched: The crisis of language which broke out at the beginning of this century is a poetic crisis. Whatever the social and historical factors, it manifested itself by attacks of depersonalization of the writer in the face of words. He no longer knew how to use them, and, in Bergson’s famous formula, he only half recognized them. He approached them with a completely fruitful feeling of strangeness. They were no longer his; they were no longer he; but in those strange mirrors, the sky, the earth, and his own life were reflected. And, finally, they became things themselves, or rather the black heart of things. And when the poet joins several of these microcosms together the case is

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like that of painters when they assemble their colors on the canvas. One might think that he is composing a sentence, but this is only what it appears to be. He is creating an object. The words-things are grouped by magical associations of fitness and incongruity, like colors and sounds. They attract, repel, and “burn” one another, and their association composes the veritable poetic unity which is the phrase-object (Sartre 1978,10).

The existentialist’s speech act, instead, uses language to communicate; “he designates, demonstrates, orders, refuses, interrogates, begs, insults, persuades, insinuates” (Sartre 1978, 13). While all this sounds like rhetorical figure, the more basic theoretical claim is that, “words are first of all not objects but designations for objects; it is not first of all a matter of knowing whether they please or displease in themselves, but whether they correctly indicate a certain thing or a certain notion” (Sartre 1978, 14). The writer’s praxis is thus “action by disclosure.” The dichotomy here between poetry and prose could not be made stronger. When Michel Foucault would later analyze the account of language as an economy of analogy, or a hermeneutics of resemblance he would link it to pre-representational significative practices that emerged in the wake of the middle ages (Foucault 1970, 17 ff.). Like Foucault, Sartre would not rest easily with such a ‘hermeneutics.’ However, the problem with such an account of signification for him was less theoretical than practical, less a matter of linguistics than politics. The problem, for Sartre, was “What is the structure of our society that provokes the appearance of this emphasis on hermeneutics?” (Sartre 1992, 435). Sartre had linked hermeneutics to the medieval clerk’s linguistic “techniques,” which “were not practiced for their own sake like spiritual exercises” (Sartre 1978, 78). The writer remained fully accommodated to the ruling class and at the service of its ideology. Only when these techniques became capable of distinguishing themselves from the object could they become explicitly an object in themselves, ideological (Sartre 1978, 77). This legacy lives on our own practices. The poet, on Sartre’s account, risks, in objectifying language, becoming simply ideological, while the existentialist, in contesting such alienated objectifications, resumes the medieval clerk’s non-spiritualized technique—albeit now fully rationalized in self-conscious responsibility. His existentialist criticism of Husserl notwithstanding, Sartre’s account of signification is staunchly transcendental: transparently devoid of the contingencies of convention, history, stylistics. It is almost as if

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the radicality of modernist poetics had forced a certain transcendental regression. If the “speaker is in a situation”—indeed “within language like we are in our body” (Sartre 1978, 7; 14)—this is not a limitation but a transcendental epistemic condition. It is still true that “words are transparent and the gaze looks through them” (Sartre 1978, 19). While the poet “more often has the scheme of the sentence in his mind, and the word follows” (Sartre 1978, 10), prose has been detached from the question of the schematism or the “verbal scheme” and linked directly to signification. “There is nothing to be said about form in advance, and we have said nothing. Everyone invents his own, and one judges it afterward” (Sartre 1978, 20). Rather than “utilizing” words, the poetic attitude is an autonomous function: the poet’s words are magical, a self constituted microcosm. “Thus in each word he realizes, solely by the effect of the poetic attitude, the metaphors which Picasso dreamed of when he wanted to do a matchbox which was completely a bat without ceasing to be a matchbox” (Sartre 1978, 8-9). Now it is clearly the surrealists that were the focus of Sartre’s ire. He found the same “error” that he had found in Klee. Again the prose of the everyday becomes transformed into poetic object. This poetic transformation was generated, he claimed, in the wake of “Baudelairian dissatisfaction,” arising out of the “obscure spot of the most bourgeois soul where all dreams meet and melt in a desperate desire for the impossible” (Sartre 1978,154; 167). Thus, the surrealist’s account of automatic writing was, for Sartre, to use Hegel’s terms, “the inverted world” to l’ homme engagé.  Indeed, such automatic writing was, above all, ‘destruction of subjectivity’: When we try our hand at it, we are spasmodically cut through by clots that tear us apart; we are ignorant of their origin; we do not know them before they have taken their place in the world of objects, and we must perceive them with foreign eyes. Thus, it is not a matter, as has too often been said, of substituting their unconscious subjectivity for consciousness, but rather of showing the object as a fitful glimmering at the heart of an objective universe (Sartre 1978, 170).

Like Klee, the surrealists had confused object and sign, inverted the voluntary for the involuntary in “the ruins of subjectivity,” inverted the subjective and the objective, a mixture of virtue and vice, “greatness and error.” But this was not all surrealism did: for “the surrealists’ next step  See Hegel 1977, 90 ff.

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was to destroy objectivity in turn” (1978, 170). And it is just this that constitutes the ambivalence of their own “greatness and error”: Whence, the ambivalence of the surrealist works: each of them can pass for the barbaric and magnificent invention of a form, of an unknown being, of an extraordinary phrase, and, as such can become a voluntary contribution to culture; and as each of them is a project for annihilating all the rest by annihilating itself along with it, Nothingness glitters on its surface, a Nothingness which is only the endless fluttering of contradictions (Sartre 1978, 172).

This Nothingness is obviously close to Sartre’s heart—or in any case the “heart of Being” on his account, wherein Sartre had discovered the very essence of consciousness or the “for-itself.” Yet surrealistic nothingness, far from inhabiting the heart of being, occurs only “at its surface.” For Sartre, this is its failure; if the surrealists had caught the radical spontaneity of the creative act, or the upsurge of the for-itself, it had not been connected to Being (or to its transformation) but rather to its impossibility. The “esprit” of surrealism, Sartre goes on to state, “…is neither Hegelian negativity, nor hypothesized Negation, nor even Nothingness, though it bears a likeness to it; it would be more correct to call it the Impossible, or, if you like, the imaginary point where dream and waking, the real and the fictitious, the objective and the subjective, merge” (Sartre 1978, 172). While it may be suggested that such a unification is what Idealism always sought, again, it is its “inverted world” that rules here: a flux of difference expelled from the world of eidetics. Rather than “dominating and governing its internal constructions” in synthesis, surrealism“wants to maintain itself in the enervating tension which is produced by an unrealizable intuition” (Sartre 1978,172-3). This stress upon the irrealizable and the impossible fulfillment of this experience was perhaps especially made by Georges Bataille, whom Sartre quotes at a number of crucial points in this text. Such “limit experiences” were precisely invoked as the alterity to the limitations of communicability or even community itself by which we are always‘insufficiently’ in the world. In searching for pure experience we are inevitably led to give up the desire to be everything through knowledge, therefore to communicate. A “new knowledge” emerges in its transgression and once again communication is given to me (Bataille 1988, 53-4). But such an “excessive” singularity encounters this new knowledge only in

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acknowledging its impossibility—that is, its failure as knowledge. If Bataille agrees that phenomenology is “the only philosophy that lives” (as did Sartre that surrealism is “the only poetic movement of the first half of the twentieth century”) the problem is that experience is not limitable to such a goal.“The limit which is knowledge as a goal must be crossed” (Bataille 1988, 8). For Sartre, however, the hopes of the poetic transgression itself remain too imaginary, too detached from the real. Interestingly, Sartre’s transcendental regressions take hold here. At most, on Sartre’s reading, surrealism remains simply the enactment of the epoche. Instead of Husserl’s scientific epoche, however, the surrealists’ epoche is like the third century skeptics Carneades and Philo, who, after enacting the epoche and “sure of not compromising themselves by an imprudent adherence, lived like everybody else”(Sartre 1978, 173). Sartre directs this (still Hegelian) critique of skepticism at the surrealists themselves: “In the same way, the surrealist, once the world is destroyed and miraculously preserved by its destruction, can shamelessly give full play to their immense love of the world” (Sartre 1978, 173). The tension which arises out of destruction never then gives way to positive ‘revolution.’ Indeed, if Sartre does claim that “surrealism is the only poetic movement of the first half of the twentieth century,” he adds that “what it liberates is neither desire nor the human totality, but pure imagination. Now, the fact is that the purely imaginary and praxis are not easily reconciled” (Sartre 1978, 191). Bataille himself responded that “it is true that the operation is not without difficulties, which surrealism has revealed but not resolved” (Bataille 1994, 66). His point remained that there is a (pseudo-) logic of domination that forestalls Sartre’s own account. Here he was direct. In his 1943 article on Bataille, “Un Nouvelle Mystique,” Sartre had already claimed that Bataille’s work violates the conditions of meaningful discourse. Sartre aligned the latter’s account of nothingness and the dark side of knowledge with Schelling’s—and again Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s indeterminacy, that at night all cows are black (Sartre 1947, 184). It appears that to give oneself to the night is rapturous. I wouldn’t doubt it. It is a certain way of dissolving oneself into nothing. But  On Hegel’s Critique of Skepticism, as “a consciousness which is empirical, which takes its guidance from what has no reality for it, see Hegel 1977, 125.

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Mr. Bataille...satisfies his wish ‘to be nothing’ in a roundabout way. With the phrases ‘nothing,’ ‘night’ and ‘a non-knowing laid bare’ he has simply presented us with a fine little pantheistic ecstasy. I call to mind what Poincare said of Riemanian geometry; replace the definition of the Riemanian plane with that of the Euclidean sphere, and you have Euclidean geometry. Indeed. And in a similar fashion. Spinoza’s system is pantheist of the right-handed type, while that of Mr. Bataille is the left-handed variety (Sartre 1947, 185).

To which Bataille adamantly replied: “At this point, however, I am the one who should elucidate Sartre, instead of the other way around. He should have me say that it ‘would be a left handed pantheism,’ if this infinite turbulence of mine had already ruled out even a possibility of stopping” (1992, 182). Unlike either Schelling or Hegel, Bataille’s ‘experience’ neither rises to the level of a proposition nor resides in a system, both of which are arguably still implicitly demanded in the existentialist phenomenological performative. Like the Hegelian account to which it appeals, Bataille claims, it “assumes a coincidence of subjective and objective aspects and at the same time a fusion of subject and object” (Bataille 1992, 186). If modern phenomenology is “replying to changing thought” it “is only one moment among others; a sandcastle, a mirage of sorts” (ibid.). Some would see in de Beauvoir’s critique of “masculine logic” in The Second Sex, a similar account of logic of domination in Sartre—or what Merleau-Ponty referred to as Sartre’s “cursed lucidity.” Rightly or wrongly, however, Bataille had already made the critique in 1945: “The profound difference between surrealism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre hangs on this character of the existence of liberty. If I do not seek to dominate it, liberty will exist: it is poetry: words no longer striving to serve some useful purpose, set themselves free and so unleash the image of free existence, which is never bestowed except in the instant” (1994, 66).

This logic of the instant is Kierkegaardian, a kairos appealed to not only by him but others in his wake, e.g., Heidegger, Benjamin, or Gadamer—and Sartre himself in the account of existential decision. As close as it may be to Sartre, here he could find in the poetic invocation of the instant only the game of loser wins. Acknowledging the failure of communication, “poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose.” The  See de Beauvoir 1968, 612 and Merleau-Ponty 1964, 24.

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word, in ceasing to become an effective means, is metamorphized and each word recovers its individuality and salvation (Sartre 1978, 30). Bataille claimed—against Sartre—that what is decisive is the spontaneity of automatic writing: surrealism “is founded on automatic writing. In so doing it extricates the human mind from any other end than poetry” (Bataille 1994, 57-8). It opens up the domain of “inner experience” that Sartre’s logic of domination foreclosed—and precludes the disclosure of a realm that Sartre’s “responsible praxis” had lost in being guided by the goal of knowledge. Thus we are beset with antinomies concerning the expressions of the imaginary: if not dominated or responsibly engaged, then art is not related to the ‘real;’ but if so related to the ‘real,’ it is still dominated by utilitarian convention, pre-accommodated, “committed to useful activity” (Bataille 1994, 46). Imagination and reason, praxis and the imaginary are all but irreconcilable. Sartre criticized these surrealists’ utopianism, “not easily reconciled” (Sartre 1978, 191). If imagination and reason are “not easily reconciled,” however, does it follow that they are simply opposed, that there is no such thing as historical imagination and hermeneutic invention? Does poetic engagement exist beyond the antinomies of meaning and use, signification and object, immanence and transcendence, ‘responsibility’ and ‘license?’ But what would it be like? Not without irony, this internal tension is never dissolved from Sartre’s account. It is perhaps the problem of irony in the Sartrean text, even while it reinvokes the Hegelian critique of irony to overcome the destruction of tradition, the classical (Sartre 1978, 85).  Granted this  This is not to deny that such oppositions can be justified but to claim that such articulemes are “schema specific.” That is, they are always articulated against a background that, in turn, delineates‘possibility’ and‘impossibility’ and remains (indeterminately) open to transformation. As ‘antinomies,’ to speak Kantian, they are less ‘mathematical’ than ‘dynamic.’ We may say of Sartre’s hope to strictly distinguish signification and object, (e.g. between experience and proposition, signification and object, the lived and its systematic ‘correlate’) maintaining its inner historicity, what Merleau-Ponty said of Kant, that what he had learned in the Transcendental Dialectic he seems to have forgotten in the Analytic (1962, 304).  On Hegel’s criticism of the beautiful soul, see Hegel 1977, 406f. On the critique of irony as a “longing which will not let itself go in actual action and production,” see Hegel 1975, 160. Sartre’s account of irony remains underdeveloped, though always presupposed. It plays an explicit part in his classical

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logic of opposition between the silent and the said, the writerly and the painterly, there are perhaps few options. Again, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the historical imaginary had sought to overcome such distinctions while, as Blanchot saw, still acknowledging a certain alterity in its midst (Blanchot 1980, 1-3). With Sartre we are confronted with a logic, if not of strict representation, then of strict phenomenological presentation, complete with its principle of presence and its logic of significative fulfillment: what is significative will be referentially significative when, and only when, it is adequate(d) to the real. It is in this sense that Sartre’s analysis remains consistent with Husserl’s famous tour of the Dresden Gallery in Ideas I, where “depictive objectification” and “sign objectification” distinctly inter-refer without ambiguity: A name reminds us, namingly, of the Dresden Gallery, and our last visit there: we walk through the halls and stand before a picture by Teniers which represents a picture Gallery. If let us say all the pictures in the latter would represent again pictures which, for their part, represent legible inscriptions, and so forth, then we can estimate which inclusion of objectifications and which mediacies are actually produced with respect to objectivities which can be seized upon (Husserl 1982, 246-7).

In such analyses all historicity and all convention have seemingly become superfluous, identically parsed in the sheer givenness in which the pictorial and the significative have been distinctly isolated before the cognitive regard. But this seems just what Sartre’s honest historical engagement and its concrete situation seemed to want to deny; for Sartre, the writer is both situated and historically engaged and responsible. Granted this complication, one option is to deny that painting has anything at all to do with such reference, signification or reality. This emancipation from the frame of “discursivity,” on Michel Foucault’s terms, is precisely what is internal to the transgressions that compose the history of painterly modernism from Manet to Warhol. Here he declared we are more like Klee than Picasso. Paul Klee’s links with surrealism were immediate and substantial. And those perhaps most influenced by surrealism have not missed its importance. This was especially true not only of the painters that Klee account of bad faith (1996, 87) but arguably underlies the dynamics of the for itself generally, as “being what it is not and not being what it is.”  See the classical analysis of Jacques Derrida (1973, 104).

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directly influenced but the‘renaissance’ that occurred in French letters in the 1950’s-60’s, reconnecting it to the issues accompanying the aleatory, chance, unconscious, phantasy and their limits. While Merleau-Ponty had already privileged Klee in his analysis of painting, beginning with Michel Foucault’s reading of Magritte, perhaps a different, more surrealist Klee came to the forefront. Indeed instead of the neoclassical or neomarxist readings of Klee, for example, both of which were grounded in the naturalist symbolism of Goethe, Foucault had declared “Breton is our Goethe” (Foucault 1997, 172). Still, Foucault, like Breton before him, believed that Klee challenges but does not fully repudiate classical painting. Breton had characterized Klee’s work as “partial automatism”; Foucault similarly claims of Klee that his emancipation from “external” representation is only partial (Breton 1972, 64). While Klee steps beyond classical painting’s representationism (and hence its ‘silent’ constitution within a discursive space) he does so, for Foucault in the invocation of a “new space,” one that is “simultaneously page and canvas, plane and volume, map and chronicle” (Foucault 1983, 41; 33). Foucault had said elsewhere that the question of space is integral today “no doubt much more than time.” Unlike time,“which was‘desacralized’ in the nineteenth century,” it seemed to Foucault that “contemporary space is not yet entirely desacralized” (Foucault 1997,177). At the same time, he suggested that if this desacrilazation is not complete, it is also true that “our life is still dominated by a certain number of oppositions that cannot be tampered with, that institutions have not ventured to change,” e.g., that between public and private space, or the space of leisure and the space of work (Foucault 1997, 177). Doubtless this remains true, for Foucault, of the opposition between discursivity and the silence or the ‘beyond’ that escapes it. Our “uncertainty” here, consequently, brings us closer to those who excavate, to Klee, to Nietzsche and Breton—and yet in Klee’s case not without certain restrictions If Klee emphasizes precisely the uncertainty of pictorial‘space’ he does so with invocation of a“new one,” Foucault claims, and this doubtless also is not yet fully released from the space of representation and its ‘sacred’ opposition. Somewhat in opposition to Klee, consequently, Magritte is  Recent Klee interpretation has been divided between a neoromantic interpretation (e.g., Glaesemer) and, following Walter Benjamin, a neo-marxist interpretation (e.g., Werckmeister). See for example Glaesemer 1986. Also compare Werckmeister 1982.

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privileged by Foucault, albeit by a certain complementarity (1983, 35). Instead of Klee’s ‘hieroglyphic’ “weaving of signs and images” resulting in a “new space,” Magritte “allows the old space of representation to rule, but only at the surface, no more than a polished stone, bearing words and shapes: beneath, nothing. It is a gravestone” (1983, 41). Indeed, this ‘nothing’ itself seems almost as impossible as Sartre had claimed of the surrealists’ “surface” and space. Analyzing Magritte’s “This Is Not a Pipe,” where text and image play off one another, Foucault claims that, in Magritte’s apparently representational and discursive space, “negations multiply themselves” and “the common space (lieu commun) has disappeared” (1983, 30-1). External resemblance has not simply been rendered uncertain but has vanished and similitude in particular, (the similitude between discourse and image), is rendered unstable in a series of multiplicities “referring” to nothing other than themselves. Foucault concluded: “A day will come, when, by means of a similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell” (1983, 54). ‘Campbell’ would thus no longer, to speak Husserlian, infinitely iterate a timeless Sinn, but would inexhaustibly differ from such identical ‘sameness.’ Here painterly modernism becomes a progressus ad Warhol and as such, exhibits a step beyond the interwoven space of Klee, ironically fulfilling the Sartrean account of the objectification of pure poetry, its opposition to discursivity complete. Moreover, what is true of painting is true of literature. Foucault’s own analysis of Bataille (or Hölderlin or Roussel) reveals a language to infinity, which, in opposition to“a purified metalanguage,” finds itself “in the thickness of words enclosed by their darkness by their blind truth” (Foucault 1977, 41). Here, too, Sartre’s oppositions between form and matter were not far removed. Ironically, in their opposition, they had divided up the grand synthesis of classical phenomenology between pure logical form and the immanent acts of consciousness. They concur in demoting the significative nexus of art from objective reference. If Duchamp, Sartre claimed, sculpts false pieces of sugar, actually cut in marble, he produces imaginary objects so constructed that their objectivity does away with itself. And, so did literature: Literature also did its best to make language go through the same kind of thing and to destroy it by telescoping words. Thus the sugar

50 Stephen watson refers to the marble and the marble to the sugar; the limp watch contests itself by its limpness; the objective destroys itself and suddenly refers to the subjective, since one disqualifies reality and is pleased to “consider the very images of the external world as unstable and transitory” and to“put them into the service of the reality of our mind.” But the subjective then breaks down in turn and allows a mysterious objectivity to appear behind it (Sartre 1978, 171).

But all this, again, for Sartre, is futile or even puerile before the duty of existentialist prose: “All this without even starting a single real destruction” (Sartre 1978, 171). We should nonetheless read Foucault as trumping Sartre’s description on two grounds. Provisionally accepting the strict Sartrean opposition between image and sign, Foucault invokes Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” to internally call into question the idea of a ‘text’ simply regulated by discourse. Secondly, as Sartre had sought to render the poetic into an autonomous (or analogous) fictional realm of objects, Foucault called into question the very idea of such autonomous prose as regulated and directed by an independent subjectivity. In both cases, Sartre’s thesis about art had been denied. The work of art, Sartre declared, “has no other substance than the reader’s subjectivity” (Sartre 1978, 39). Indeed, while realized in a medium, in painting or “through language (it) is never given in language,” and has value only as an appeal to engaged responsibility (Sartre 1978, 38). Foucault denied this reduction and the ahistorical purity of the gaze that would constitute it. “The breakdown of philosophical subjectivity and its dispersion in a language that dispossesses it while multiplying it within the space created by its absence is probably one of the fundamental structures of contemporary thought” (Foucault 1977, 42). Sartre, himself, acknowledged that language is a limit upon our situation, but he continuously drew not upon the epistemic or semantic account but his ‘ethical’ conclusion: “Since he has once engaged himself in the universe of language, he can never pretend that he can not speak. Once you enter the universe of significations, there is nothing you can do to get out of it” (Sartre 1978, 18). What Sartre held was that this silence “is defined in relation to words” and that “words are transparent;” he hoped to acknowledge, thereby, both the historicity of language and the phenomenological purity of prosaic enunciation. As he had replied to the ‘thomist’ in “Existentialism is a Humanism,” granted, the signs are there, but they must be interpreted and this implied a reduction of

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meaning to ‘use’—or in Sartre’s terms ‘creation’: “in any case, I myself choose the meaning they have” (1957, 28). Foucault (and those more closely related to surrrealism) rightly saw the “impossibility” of this position and the impossibility of its strictly transcendental foundation. Indeed the very idea of ‘prose’ and analogical image (uniting discourse and image in resemblance and similitude) struck Foucault as no less “magical” itself, based historically on the ‘magical’ or the analogical hermetics of resemblance that Foucault had traced in the hermeneutics of the renaissance—and arguably still dominated by medieval analogical accounts. Indeed, while Sartre had limited myth (and the classical) to a strictly regulated society which “confounds the present with the eternal and historicity with traditionalism” (Sartre 1978, 85), the idea of a pure creative subjectivity devoid of myth surely itself risks turning mythic for the same reason. Indeed, as Bataille had rightly seen, “the absence of myth is also a myth”—even if it is our myth (1994, 48). Sartre affirmed the opposition of text and image. Foucault’s response went further; he traced their dissolution through Magritte. Henceforth—and beginning with Flaubert and Manet—art and literature would, Foucault claimed, be erected “within the archive.” This would occur not out of classical lamentation for the origin but rather in order to explore the space that had been opened up: “the aspect in painting or writing that remains essentially open” (Foucault 1977, 9). The result would, consequently, be less concerned with the figuration of another transcendent or external space but only with “the square and massive surface of painting” and “the indefinite murmur of words” (Foucault 1977, 93). But this was surely not the only option. While Foucault attempted to articulate the ‘silence’ intrinsic to painting by distinguishing it from the space of representation, Jean-Francois Lyotard, for example, attempted to articulate the silent significance that exceeds “the said.” More explicitly Freudian, Lyotard articulates an account of the figure-matrix through which the silence of original phantasy is expressed outside and excessive to discursivity. Even though he retains an account of painting as original expressivity, for Lyotard, the artist does not simply communicate originary phantasies. Iteration here would demand precisely an identity of such phantasies in the spectator. Rather the figure-matrix schematizes such phantasies in the work of art. In a sense, the figure-matrix makes possible iterability between‘subjects,’ as does the Husserlian noema—but precisely as more originary than it. Incapable of reduction, the figure is not restricted (nor regulated)

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by discourse, image, or form (or conscious regard) since it expressively resides in the three spaces together and makes possible both identity and opposition among them (Lyotard 1971, 278). Accordingly, while Foucault sees Klee to be constructing representationally, i.e., discursively, a “new space,” Lyotard invokes Klee’s work as an example of a more primary figure-matrix process. He argues that Klee increasingly explores thereby a more primordial expressivity, antecedent to representation. Lyotard claims the transformation in Klee’s work occurs as he increasingly acquires a more critical relation to the figure-matrix. Early on, Klee attempted to more directly communicate phantasy, while the later works’ ‘glyphic’ forms articulate neither sheer lines nor drawings—as Sartre, too, remarked. In these works discourse and figure are explicitly, albeit indeterminately and expressively, together within the visual field. As art historians have noted, moreover, this heterogeneity further explains the prominence of mythic themes. This is especially true in the late works, where the figure-matrix allows for the expression of meaning to transcend both discursive and representational (including facist) myth. This re-raises the question of the importance of myth, and in particular its political implications. While we are not concerned with the political, throughout Klee’s career the latter surely accompanies the issues of ‘primitivism’ in his art (the ethnographic, the art of the insane, or the art of children). Moreover it accompanies the issues that cluster around spontaneity (or automatism) that accompanied the problem of surrealism from the outset, and have overdetermined discussions here. If Sartre had condemned such views to the irrational, Foucault spent much of his career arguing against such condemnations. And the charge of primitivism or irrationalism accompanied Klee’s work as well, as we have seen. Historians have noted that such charges miss his point, however, as the following evidences from his 1912 review of the joint exhibition of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung and the Blaue Reiter, Klee states: For there are still primal beginnings in art, which one is more likely to find in ethnographic museums or at home in the nursery (don’t laugh dear reader); children can do it too, and that is in no sense devastating for the latest efforts; on the contrary, there is positive wisdom in this state of affairs. The more helpless these children are,  See Werckmeister 1985, Introduction.

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the more instructive is the art they offer us; for there is already a corruption here: when children begin to absorb developed works of art or even imitate them. Parallel phenomena are the drawings of the mentally ill, and so madness is not an apt word of abuse either. All that, in truth, must be taken far more seriously if present-day art is to be reformed. So far back will we have to go if we are not simply to imitate antiquity.

As Klee’s historian, Marcel Fransiscono, rightly sees, this step beyond ‘antiquity’ involves neither primitivism, nor regression nor even the affirmation of insight into a spontaneous “unconscious enormous power” (Franciscono 1991, 167). Instead Klee saw such interest or investigations to be part of the exploration and ‘reformation’ (and rational potential) of contemporary art. Blanchot will make defenses (on behalf of Webern and Klee) concerning similar charges by Adorno (Blanchot 1992, 345 ff.)—though he also would distance himself from the “temptation to which surrealism risks succumbing when it lends itself to a search for the immediate” (1992, 410). How are we to escape the apparent antinomies regarding the imagination that result, that affirmation of such ‘spontaneity’ is either beyond the reach of reason or wholly contained within it? As Sartre had put it, since the image is a function of spontaneity, there is nothing in the image that I have not put in it. Phenomenological imagination, for Sartre, is strictly contained by the reflective regard and, therefore, “there is nothing new to be found in the imagination because I have made it” (Sartre 1968, 10). That is, phenomenologically, subject and object are not only intentionally parallels, but coefficients: as Fichte had put it, Ich = Ich.10 Hence, the result: “nothing can be learned from an image that is not already known” (Sartre 1968, 11). Arguably, even phenomenologically construed, this fails however. If I am intentionally related to imaginative acts, “I” am not their simple coefficient. This is precisely how it can be that I might be taken by “surprise” in such imagining, as Schelling saw. Klee invokes the term, too, for the account of figurative invention. Moreover the reference to Schelling further explains Klee’s cosmological ‘mytheme,’ that nature as ‘Will’ works itself through me. Such an account was in the background  Cited in Franciscono 1991, 167. 10 See Casey 2002, 93n. For the Fichtean ‘protocol see the 1794 Wissenschafts­ lehre (i.e., “the first absolutely unconditioned principle”: 1982, 93 f.)

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of surrealism, as Bataille noted in his piece on Sartre, in aligning surrealism and Romanticism, the former radicalizing romanticism by bringing everything into question (Bataille 1994, 57). Still, for Klee (and this is why, perhaps, his is only a “partial automatism” for Breton), it is not the case that I am simply ‘over-taken’ by such imaginative events, delivered over or forced to ascent to their naive immanence; this would involve the return of primitivism that he has denied. As Husserl had seen in replying to Hume, the explicative series in passive synthesis does not succumb to causal association but to adumbrative explication. No more does the series of ‘imaginings’: both are examples of transcendences—albeit still ‘motivated,’ a step into the unknown.11 The“interruption” of reason is not reason’s inversion—any more than it is its completion.12 Instead, against the reduction of phenomenological immanence, such interruptions or transcendences trace an irreducible excess. Accordingly, subjectivity here, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms “is not motionless identity: as with time, it is of its essence, in order to be genuine subjectivity, to open itself to an Other and to go forth from itself ” (1962, 426). This opening arrests, to use Blanchot’s terms, the attempt to conceive intentionality “in order to guarantee judgment” (1992, 251). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty, whose account of sense and significance provided a protocol for Sartre, found therein “typical relationships” transcending the distinctions between nature and convention, sense impression and categorical act, a body-synthesis he identifies with Kant’s transcendental imagination (1962, 168; 192). Indeed at stake is an event in which the question of transcendence is never exhausted; it is always an ‘incarnate’ event irreducible to an act, a “gift” which the mind “makes use of beyond all hope” (1962, 127). As Sartre argued in the Transcendence of the Ego, it may seem the case that the “I think” must accompany all our representations. But the question is, does it? (1971, 32 f.) While Sartre distinguished these he retained the“I think’s” immanence for the contents of consciousness. Too often Sartre confused phenomenological immanence and transcendence: where transcendence is not the simple sign of inadequateness (or illusion) but an excess never finally reduced or cognitively adequated—and yet still relied upon. Sartre’s subreptions regarding transcendence were certainly at work in his dealings with the imaginary, certainly present in 11 See Husserl 1973, Appendix II. 12 See Watson 1992, Ch. II.

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his account of the imaginary, too often reduced by him simply to what I ‘create’ and am consequently reflectively responsible for. The difference between image and reality is not absolute but equally historical, a matter always of “intentional implication;” perception is co-determined by the possibility of phantasial modification and vice versa. Without reducing the distinction to “degrees of evidence,” it should be admitted that the centaur too has its transcendencies, indeterminacies, problematic status and horizonal (i.e., historical) coherence. If the real and the imaginary remain phenomenologically distinct, where does the imaginary begin and where does it end if it is devoid of the ego’s domination? The result looks, beyond the attempt to guarantee judgment, like a very different domain, one perhaps Blanchot has aptly caught in a lengthy passage with significant consequences for the issue that dogs Sartre: By showing there is a rigorous correlation between the determinations of the object and the steps of the “consciousness” that intends them or takes up their evidency, phenomenology made thought familiar with the idea of a relation that is empirical and transcendental. Or, to state this more clearly: it is intentionality that maintains the empirical and the transcendental within a structured relation—an alliance that is essentially modern, that is to say, explosive. As a result, the empirical is never in and of itself the empirical: no experience can claim of itself to be in itself knowledge or truth. And also as a result of this, the “transcendental” will find itself nowhere localized: neither in a consciousness that is always already outside itself, nor in the so called natural reality of things (which must always be suspended or reduced). Rather it will reside in the emergence of networks of relations that neither unite nor identify but maintain what is in relation at a distance, and make of this distance, recaptured as a form of alterity, a new power of determination (1992, 251).

This network of relations, Blanchot realized, has much then in common with his account of “the game, the aleatory, the encounter” and the “new space” of surrealism (1992, 421). In this guise, it impacts Blanchot’s own account of Klee, for whom, like for Foucault, Klee “dreams of a space where the omission of every center would at the same time do away with any trace of the vague or the indecisive” (1992, 350). Moreover, far from being simply contradictory or nihilistic, or even simply impossible, tout court, there is a sense in which, freed from ‘knowledge’ or the constraints of strenge Wissenschaft, all this remains ‘phenomenologically’ a matter of the everyday, precisely insofar as the (aleatory) everyday escapes strict

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phenomenological adequation (1992, 241-4). Such a phenomenology, consequently, would require a step beyond its classical formulations. Writing in 1948, Levinas said of the captivation or incantation of poetry and music: “It is a mode of being to which applies neither the form of consciousness, since the I is stripped of its prerogative to assume its power, nor the form of unconsciousness, since the whole situation and all its articulation are in a dark light present. Such is a waking dream” (1987, 4). The image is a shadow of reality, not its representation, literally beyond the world of judgment. And he adds: Here we have really an exteriority of the inward. It is surprising that phenomenological analysis never tried to apply this fundamental paradox of rhythm and dreams, which describes a sphere situated outside of the conscious and the unconscious, a sphere whose role in all ecstatic rites has been shown by ethnography; it is surprising that we have stayed with metaphors of “ideomotor” phenomena and with the study of the prolongation of sensing actions (1987, 4).

This opening beyond the “ideomotor” is precisely where Levinas himself would surpass classical phenomenology, transforming its other into the sacred understood as the ethical. He did so ultimately by articulating an event that opened beyond the image in announcing both the exteriority and the imperative of the ethical—the obligating appearance of the ‘face of the other.’ The protocols for this passage through ethnography (and beyond) had been prepared for by phenomenologists of religion such as van der Leeuw or Buber or Rosenzweig.13 This “relationality” of the “beyond” (or to demystify perhaps, according to Wittgenstein, the “family resemblance” or Blanchot the “strange plurality”) is what connects (and interrelates) the other, the primitive, and the sacred at the limit of phenomenology. This doubtless turns its Husserlian theater of immanence into something more resembling the dramatics and reversals of the Hegelian series of figures (Gestalten). As such it is the opening 13 Of these thinkers perhaps van der Leeuw remains the least now known in this context but his work in the phenomenology of religion (especially in what Levinas calls its ethnographic or comparative), surely makes it critical at this point. See Van Der Leeuw 1986. For further discussion of these issues and, in particular, the question of surrealism, see Rabinovitch 2002. Also see Clifford 1988, “Ethnographic Surrealism:” “The surrealist moment in ethnography is that moment in which the possibility of comparison exists in unmediated tension or with sheer incongruity” (146).

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of a ‘hermeneutics’ (or even an account of the ‘sacred’) that was beyond the discussive regulations to which both had been previously bound.14 Its topos ‘strangely’ would unite thinkers as diverse as Levinas, Bataille, Blanchot, Kristeva, Callois, and Breton. Emphatically, Foucault had made a similar point in his own evaluation of surrealism: There is no doubt that the whole network connecting the works of Breton, Georges Bataille, Leiris, and Blanchot, and extending through the domains of ethnology, art history, the history of religions, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, are effacing the rubrics in which our culture had classified itself, and revealing unforeseeable kinships, proximities, and relations. It is very probable that we owe this new scattering and this new unity of our culture to the person and the work of André Breton. He was both the spreader and the gatherer of all this agitation in modern experience (Foucault 1997, 174).

This is admittedly overstated; Foucault acknowledged that much of what we find in Breton is to be found like in others, complicated in relation to the archive, “prefigured in Goethe, in Nietzsche, Mallarmé or others.” It is critical that Foucault also claims that “what we really owe him is the discovery of a space that is not that of philosophy nor of literature, nor of art, but that of experience” (Foucault 1997, 174). This is precisely the realm which Sartre’s phenomenology had sought to free in his attacks on surrealism (174). But for Foucault this space of new relations belies the distinctions between philosophy and poetry. To use a term of Derrida’s, who through the notion of archi-écriture was still trying to “attain by deconstruction its ultimate foundation,” the concept of experience is“unwieldy,” indeed“embarassing (embarrassant)” (Derrida 1976, 60). Experience remains divided between intuition and concept, event and history,“archesynthesis” and what inevitably escapes. Doubtless in all these cases, experience, history—and even perhaps ‘phenomenology’ itself, unwittingly—both thinkers, unlike Sartre, were replanking the raft as they went. Both as experience and concept, however, this space of new ‘relations’ is also the very space opened by imagination, as Blanchot saw. What Sartre may have forgotten in all this (and in his own attack on surrealism on the question of writing and the imagination) was the dependence of phenomenological reflection itself upon fantasizing. The ‘free varia14 See “Hermeneutics and the Retrieval of the Sacred,” Ch. III in Watson 1992.

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tion’ that discloses (and conceals) pure possibility (and necessity) also explicates the phenomenological return to origins through the ‘texts’ of ‘time’ and ‘image,’ reflection and dream, consciousness and its own ‘fictions’ as Husserl put it in Ideas I. He famously wrote: “free phantasies acquire a position of primacy over perceptions and do so even in the phenomenology of perception itself…” (Husserl 1982, 158-9). In the extended passage quoted above, Klee articulates the differentiation of such possibilities in the attempt to escape the limitations of factical antiquity, articulating what he will call elsewhere “the prehistory of the visible”(Klee, 1978a, 60) The question of the return to origins (Rückfrage) cannot simply be reduced to the conscious gaze but is equally dependent upon what escaped it in the ‘text’ of the imaginary and what, perhaps reflectively construed then, remains ‘unconscious,’ conditional and ‘excessive’ to the regard of significative intention. But both Husserl and Sartre problematically sought to contain such ‘transcendence’ by reflective or ‘transcendental immanence,’ conflicting the transcendence of dialectical possibility with analytic necessities. Having encountered this “strange plurality” one can see the ease, the complicities and the complications at stake when post-Sartrean phenomenologists like Edward Casey must take up the matter. An author of the classical study on phenomenological imagining in English, even Casey found here a convergence between Husserlian phantasieren, which reveals essential possibility through imaginative variation, and something like the Jungian unconscious.15 In this convergence, Jung’s so called ‘archetypes’ would need to be understood more ‘eidetically’ or at least as ‘eidetic variations’ rather than as set of primitive natural facts (as he too often interpreted them). As Jung himself had likewise declared, in this regard they are an a priori condition of possibility.16 Like the problem of the Kantian “schematism,” Jung thought, such archetypes revealed an “art hidden in the depths of the human soul, a treasure in the realm of shadowy thought” that is exhausted by none of its exemplifications ( Jung 1990, 84). Similarly, Jung’s archetypes are ‘transitional’ analogs always in need of interpretation or refiguration (‘symbolic’ as he argued—and in their alterity, doubtless allegorical 15 See Casey 2002, 212 ff. 16 See Jung 1990, 66. Cp. Klee’s self description: “I place myself at a remote starting point of creation, whence I state a priori formulas for men, beasts, plants, stones and the elements, and for all the whirling forces.” See Klee 1964, 345.

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in Benjamin’s sense).17 It is not surprising that Adorno suggested to Benjamin that he would need to confront (and criticize) Jung’s account of the collective unconscious, especially singling out Jung’s reading of aesthetics.18 This task surely played a role in what Benjamin called “the epistemological foundations” of the Arcade’s Project.19 As Jung’s account blinkingly acknowledges, such possibilities require that we need to add the limitations (and excess) of the Kantian schematism to the phenomenologists’ reflective variability. Thereby we encounter again the problem of transcendence, the problem of finitude or historicity. Taken together they imply that phenomenology must be understood to involve less an apriori possibility or pure factum but rather, as Heidegger put it in his study of the schematism, an event that is always already “exploratory.”20 Hence Heidegger’s penchant for translating the Platonic eidos phenomenologically, always as its adumbrative Aspekt. Correlatively, at stake is not simply a description of self-contained mental facts (this is Husserl’s lingering cartesianism). Rather such a ‘phenomenology’ involves the exploration of a transcendent or adumbrative event that exceeds us and which encounters its own limits—perhaps to use Benjamin’s term, even “the death of intention,” strictly construed. And Klee’s exploratory defense of the primitive in his extension beyond the classical tradition doubtless should be understood in this light. The encounter with the primitive is by no means an encounter with an immanent essence more true than the classical but an alterity that articulates in the encounter itself more than the past might contain—and where, granted both the coherence (or textuality) of the past and the alterity of the present, ‘image’ and ‘text’ become interspersed as an adumbrative complex in

17 See Jung 1971, 111. This text makes Jung’s account’s links with post-Kantian aesthetics of symbol and allegory clear—an archive I have traced more fully with respect to Gadamer and Benjamin elsewhere. See Watson 2004. 18 See Adorno and Benjamin 1998, 61. Adorno notes the “not insignificant essay on Joyce” that appears, along with Jung’s writings on Picasso in Jung 1966. 19 Adorno and Benjamin 1998, 61; 201. 20 See Heidegger 1990, 127. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s similar invocation of “an operative imaginary,” in his later critique of Sartre, which is “part of our institution, and which is indispensable for the definition of Being itself ” (1968, 85).

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the play of possibility, one always in need to interpretation (Benjamin 1999, 463).21 This only emphasizes the ambiguity involved: such adumbrations are theoretically underdetermined. This account for the fact that, while Husserl appeals to James’ stream of consciousness for the adumbrations of the perceived world, Jung appeals to James for his account of the symbolic. This is the so-called “free association” in the unconscious and the active imagination: “much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another.”22 Moreover even James himself had interests in such matters as the unconscious and “automatic writing.”23 Jung however denies rational access to this realm as well, almost on ‘Sartrean’ grounds: “the rational functions are, by their very nature, incapable of creating symbols, since they produce only rationalities whose meaning is determined unilaterally and does not at the same time embrace its opposite”—tantamount, again, to declaring that reason only understands what it has itself put in it, i.e., univocally determined.24 The ‘symbolic’ exceeds such parameters, and exceeds the real only by being rediscovered at its heart. Jung’s search for the archetypes remains less a return to primitive facts (or as Blanchot puts it, an attempt to retrieve “a respectable spirituality” (1992, 299) than it is perhaps grasped as a matter of the social or historicity. Jung himself had articulated the antinomies of artistic possibility in the work of Picasso and Joyce.25 It 21 Benjamin invokes “this point of explosion” in the image that is the death of intentio precisely against phenomenology and even Heidegger’s “vain” attempt “to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through ‘historicity’”(462). Without mediating between these accounts, I am simply suggesting the plurality that conjoins them. Much more would need to be said. In the “ruins” of phenomenology however, much hangs upon the “adumbration” of images. Benjamin’s account of the death of ‘intentio,’ was written, obviously unaware of the later writings of Husserl, which arguably leads beyond the restrictions of the Ideen account. 22 See Jung 1967, 17. 23 See Gertrude Stein’s account of experimenting with automatic writing while she worked under James in “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” in Stein 1962, 74. 24 See Jung 1971, 111. 25 See Jung 1966, 109-143. For Jung, both artists articulated the possibilities of a “new cosmic consciousness” albeit under the fragmented conditions of the present and its resulting drame intérieur.

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remains perhaps similarly at stake in the Picasso/Klee double, divided between the systematic ‘invention’ or exploratory ‘excavation’ of expressive form. This is because this double of unity and fragmentation is at work in the symbolic function everywhere. But Sartre could view the resulting expressive images only in terms of consciousness and signification. Doubless it was with this in mind that Blanchot argued that signification, so construed, in a sense detaches itself from iterative or significative mimesis: “The image has nothing to do with signification, meaning as implied by the existence of the world, the effort of truth, the law and the brightness of the day. Not only is the image of an object not the meaning of that object and of no help in comprehending it, but it tends to withdraw from its meaning by maintaining it in the immobility of a resemblance that has nothing to resemble” (Blanchot 1981, 85). Blanchot’s followers would not miss this. The network of intentionalities in which “the empirical is never in and of itself empirical” and the “‘transcendental’ will find itself nowhere localized,” will always involve, as Foucault saw, an “empirico-transcendental doublet” (Foucault 1970, 318). Derrida too saw that this intentional network would always emerge “as a warp of language, logic, evidence, fundamental security, upon a woof that is not its own” (Derrida 1976, 67). It is in just this ‘crossing’ or ‘doubling,’ belying the simple distinction (indeed the Cartesian ‘distinctness’ ) between immanence and transcendence (or active and passive synthesis), that the image becomes, in terms Blanchot (and Benjamin) invoke, always potentially “explosive” with respect to intention. What Levinas called the‘ethnographic’ decentering of the phenomenological image does not involve a naive return to the primitive. Derrida, nonetheless, argued that Levinas’ own attempt to simply distinguish the religion of the sacred law from sacred, but still pagan naturalness is forced (Derrida 1998a, 150). In fact, Derrida had argued similarly in relation to Bataille, that such claims to the archaic or the sacred could be accessed only through a double reading that would not simply submit the known to archaicism, but through understanding the latter as equally a proposition, albeit one that opens itself up beyond the predetermined sovereignty of meanings. This looks like the very premises of what he called deconstruction (and it is). It also acknowledges, beyond Bataille’s empiricism, a double gesture in the refiguration, the twofold synthesis to the passage from the past to the future “beyond” or“outside,” the twofold

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synthesis of retention and protention.26 In this respect, beyond the limits of a phenomenology predetermined in sense, another ‘phenomenology’ emerges, one no longer governed by the ‘sovereignty’ of a meaningful correlate. ‘Phenomenology’ thus, for Derrida, could not be understood as a meaningfully isolatable term. Nor could it be simply determined by a semantic context, but would be subject to its own internal (historical ) ‘drift,’ indeed, the very one we have articulated here (cf. Derrida 1978, 273). Here too, as Derrida argued concerning Bataille, “Tradition’s names are maintained, but they are struck with the differences between the major and the minor, the archaic and the classic. This is the only way, within discourse, to mark that which separates discourse from its excess” (1978, 272). Yet, such a strategy is equally in accord with what Heidegger saw as the exploratory (and hermeneutic) legacy of transcendental imagination, the ‘gathering together’ of discourse and its excess, immanence and transcendence, analysis and synthesis, intelligible (i.e., ontic) schema and ontological possibility. In thus elevating the imagination, Heidegger acknowledged he followed post-Kantian thought (explicitly Fichte, Jacobi and Schelling). But this also indicates the false charges about irrationality here. Doubtless Heidegger also followed, thereby, the post-Kantian account of judgement as differentiation (Unterscheidung). Here, as Fichte put it, qua mutually interrelated, “every positive judgement can also be considered to be a negative one.” But then, as Novalis would interpret Fichte, in this differentiation, all terms—even the ego itself—become ‘hieroglyphic.’27 As we have discovered, Klee’s ‘hieroglyphic’ explorations are equally to be found here. But it is also decisive that Heidegger could still retain the term “phenomenology” for all this. Such a “phenomenology” would involve, as was the account of time internal to it, the constant reweaving of warp and woof, albeit no longer governed by the‘sovereign’ gaze, and no longer governable by the external correlation of form and content. Phenomenology would no longer simply be strictly pre-figured in advance; it would involve a transcendental 26 Hence while this “double reading” looks like an extreme or an ‘exceptional’ account of interpretation, elsewhere I have argued that it underlies the rationality of traditionality more generally. See “Our Reciprocal Rejoinder with the Past: On Heidegger’s Erwiderung,” Introduction to Watson 1997. 27 See the analysis of judgment as differentiation by Manfred Frank (2004, 85 f.)

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logic that is neither simply conceptually regressive (or ‘reductive’) nor predetermined (by a pure form), a schematism whose adumbrative ‘texture’ remains inevitably exploratory. So interpreted, phenomenology would always already in this regard, be “multi-dimensional,” to use Klee’s term—indeed even ‘aleatory.’ And when Derrida cites Klee it is precisely in this regard. For Derrida, Klee’s work articulates the aleatory distinction of form and content. In particular, he cites the 1927 “Constructiv-impressiv” where nails (“the points that nail the canvas onto the painting”) presumably appear in the painting. Here the image is neither dissolved nor simply opposed to ‘discourse’ but remains lacking in completeness; its synthesis to speak Husserlian remains (not only uncertain or ‘inadeqaute’ but) ‘transcendent’ and indeterminately ‘transitional,’ the presentation of a “texture” in “an object which has been transfigured” (Derrida, 1987,304). This perhaps tells us something about Klee’s multidimensionality as well. Despite its acknowledgments of abstraction or constructivism, (again unlike Foucault’s interpretation of him) Klee’s work is neither the construction of a “new space” nor the representation of a propositional space. What after all, would a “new space” mean here? Rather, it explicates the constant raveling and unraveling of the constructiveimpressive conjunction (or heterogeneous synthesis) that is involved in espacement—as a general phenomenon (or phenomenalization). As has become now apparent, something similar is at hand in what we have been calling the indeterminacy, ‘inadequation’ or ‘drift’ internal to phenomenology. At stake is not simply a step beyond (or behind) reason, nor even simply a kind of trembulatum before what Blanchot called the unfigurable universe. It was, in some respect, all of these, confronted with an event in which the intentional adequatio has been abandoned—or an event in which ‘adequatio’ abandons us. It was also the recognition of the problem of the ‘dehiscent’ or ‘textured’ plurality articulated adumbratively within the event of intentional implication itself. The problem is that, far from there being too few ‘figures’ in this event of inadequation, there were also too many; the sacred, the other, could be neither simply allowed in nor simply ruled out. Moreover, devoid of such determinacy there would be no one strictly scientific (or anti-scientific), metaphysical (or non-metaphysical) concept of the other or the sacred—and surely not “the” surreal. And, this would be the lot of more than one of our epistemic practices shorn of scientific pretense. Derrida has similarly noted such an effect in arguing that

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“there is not one (psychoanalytic concept of ) resistance, there is not ‘la psychanalyse’ whether one understands it here as a system of theoretical norms or as a charter of institutional practices” (1998b, 20). And more to the point, having denied the strictly scientific status of such terms, is his characterization of the result, too often construed as evidence of a theoretical failure or a pseudo-science: If this is indeed the way it is, this situation does not necessarily translate a failure. There is also a chance for success, with no need to dramatize things. I don’t believe one needs to turn this disjunction, in this case or any other, into bad drama. The inability to gather oneself, to identify with oneself, to unify oneself, all of this is perhaps tragedy itself, but it is also (the) chance and if there is no reason to dramatize, it is not only because that serves no purpose but also because it has not the least pertinence for this alliance of destiny, namely tragedy, and chance as the possible or the aleatory (1998b, 21).

If this logic of “strange plurality” seems still an appeal to the theoretically surreal, (or a sur-rationality, as Bachelard put it), it is what philosophers of science would call the “fertility of theory,” gauged by a theory’s ability to interact, contest and to advance the rational, even if fallibly or unknowingly.28 Thus understood, we have been tracing the surrationality of ‘phenomenology.’ Even so, it might be replied, all this seems far from the sacred, in its purity and exteriority. Yet, sounding very much like Sartre’s “we are condemned to be free,” Mircea Eliade once said: “Hermeneutics—the science of interpretation—is the Western man’s reply—the only intelligent reply—to the demands of contemporary history, to the fact that the West is committed (one might be tempted to say “condemned”) to a confrontation with the cultural values of the ‘others’” (Eliade 1962, 11). Surely this occurs out of the“chance” of respecting what we don’t know but also in acknowledging (the problem of Enlightenment itself ) that we might have something to learn from it (Kant’s sapere aude).29 That this ‘condemnation’ and its chance has been reserved for our classical discourse for disambiguating theological texts (‘hermeneutics,’ a term no more strictly determinate than‘phenomenology’) is perhaps not a matter of chance. To use Blanchot’s term, at stake is a discourse of interruptions. 28 On Bachelard’s term ‘surrationality’ see “Le surrationalisme,” in Bachelard 1972. 29 See “What is Enlightenment?” in Kant 1963, 3.

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Such a hermeneutics openly acknowledges its own rational and semantic ‘drift,’ combining, without resolving, the problem of transcendence and immanence, the same and the other. Both conceptually and historically, it might be said, this hermeneutics has something ‘surreal’ about it. In its interplay of conceptual and experiential horizons hermeneutics involves the encounter with the unknown, even against our wishes and the ‘unconscious’ of knowledge and its sovereign gaze. For Blanchot, this was precisely the site of écriture automatique, which formed the legacy of surrealism and “one of literature’s principle aspirations:” it provided, that is, both a “weapon against reflection” and a “belief in words” (1995, 86). Accordingly, the legacy of philosophy and écriture automatique then becomes somewhat unwieldy, almost inevitably understood in these authors as an encounter with philosophy’s beyond, the ‘outside,’ its limit or its ‘hieroglyphic’ remainder. As Derrida would inevitably put it, strictly construed, this legacy involves the “becoming absent and the becoming unconscious of the subject”—but without, it should be insisted, succumbing simply to either absence or the unconscious (1976, 69). Even if its phenomenology is to be understood only as a certain ‘fictionalization’ that subtends the discourse of truth, this occurs without succumbing to irrationality. It is precisely this hieroglyphic structure that forms, Derrida claimed, the structure of interpretation—even Bataille’s. “Like every discourse, like Hegel’s, Bataille’s discourse has the form of a structure of interpretation” (1978, 274). Indeed, as has become apparent, this step beyond (a step beyond that in fact reinvokes both Hegel and Schelling and the question of the ‘surprise’) is equally albeit “beyond the opposition of the mystic and the rational”—and yet obviously a beyond not without risk. It is also not without relation to Sartre, who had found here only a contradictory combinatoire of scientism and mysticism (Derrida 1978, 272; 269). No more than Bataille could remove such a writing from the task of interpretation could Sartre restrict it to the gaze of conscious regard—and neither, as a result, would grasp Heidegger, as Derrida notes (1978, 338). Writing is thus, in becoming other itself, the espacement of theory. We are reminded, as Louis Marin once put it that Klee’s painting is similarly peinture-écriture (Marin 1970, 74-5). Indeed this was his stated intention, the development of a “kind of picture writing”—one in the end, that is neither sign nor object but the hieroglyphic texture

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through which both are generated (Klee 1978b, 83).30 In fact, as Klee put it himself, its strange plurality remains always “multidimensional,” an infinite polyvalence of sens. But, as we have seen, Klee’s work, too, is by no means unprincipled, if always interpretive. It is just this genesis beyond ‘mysticism’ and ‘scientism’ that makes its ‘automotism’ always fragmented and “partial” to use Breton’s terms.31 And, as has become evident, in the same gesture Klee too had transcended the classical antinomies of prose and poetry, intuition and concept, ‘surrealism’ and ‘phenomenology’—at least as Sartre had initially construed them. But even he knew better. The irony is that having posited the adventure of the dialectic between the prosaic and the poetic as he had defined it, Sartre himself acknowledged a certain internal limitation, if not impossibility to its expression. Perhaps he had relied on the ironies of ‘impossibility’ throughout. The distinction, in any case, he knew was only pragmatic and ‘impure’ at best: It goes without saying that in all poetry a certain form of prose, that is, of success, is present; and vice versa, the driest prose always contains a bit of poetry, that is a certain form of defeat; no prose-writer is quite capable of expressing what he wants to say; he says too much or not enough, each phrase is a wager, a risk assumed; the more cautious one is, the more attention the word attracts; as Valéry has shown, no one can understand a word to its very bottom (Sartre 1978, 31).

As Sartre’s best scholars would explain, this dialectic that appears in the footnotes of What is Literature? would inevitably force him to ‘deossify’ the polarities of prose and poetry.32 As a result, language itself would be recognized more and more as a concrete historical materiality 30 See the analysis of K. Porter Aichele (2002). Aichele rightly sees that Klee’s heiroglyphics breaks down Enlightenment accounts (e.g., La Fontaine, Lessing) that divide poetry and painting, and she traces its antithesis tradition, the ut pictura poiesis, to Horace’s Ars Poetica. Before that tradition, it should be added, Plutarch quotes Simonides as calling “painting silent poetry, and poetry articulated painting.” 31 Similarly we should add, Derrida’s own écriture remains ‘partial,’ a refusal to substitute the ‘mechanism’ of automatic writing for the writing of reflection. If he insisted (still ironically) on the ‘act’ of writing as the “becoming unconscious of the subject” or the decisive progress of formalism” he likewise demanded that both “must discover a field of transcendental experience” (1976, 61). 32 See, for example, Christina Howells 1990.

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with which the writer would grapple in order to say what remained unsayable within it. And this unsayble (indisable) itself would require us to see the result in terms of a non-knowledge (le non savoir) yet to be revealed by means of imaginary transformation. In all this it is clear that Sartre’s initial distinctions between prose and poetry, sense and signification—and also ‘phenomenology’ itself—would need to be transformed. Like the distinction between the imaginary and the real itself, the relation between knowledge and nonknowledge, object and sign had been continuously and lucidly called into question. In retrospect, this was indeed the irony of Sartre’s (again footnoted) condemnation of Klee’s “greatness and error”—which lies, he claimed, in “Klee’s attempt to make a painting both a sign and an object.” The irony is that Klee might have become, like Flaubert and Mallarmé concerning the materialities of literature, something of a mentor in grasping the origins and ‘drift’ of phenomenology itself. Doubtless this accounts for Klee’s importance, say, to the later Heidegger, to Merleau-Ponty, or to Lyotard in their attempts to traverse the ossifications of the classical stronghold (réduit) of phenomenology. In all this we can still witness the proximity (and legacy) of Blanchot’s own earliest interpretation of surrealism. The latter, he declared, in emphasizing the “transcendence” of language, had revealed a language that, in refusing to be relegated to strict rational construction or cognitive use, might instead be appropriated for the task of freedom itself—a task doubtless, the later Sartre would add, is always a matter of concrete historical necessity (Blanchot 1995, 86-88).33 But perhaps it would be left to Merleau-Ponty, on whom Sartre relied so much in aesthetic mat33 As noted previously, by refusing its reduction to rational construction or ‘use,’ such transcendence is by no means rendered irrational simpliciter; rather we articulate a rationality that is, like the schematisms of historical imagination that it relies upon, always schema specific and interpretive. No more than did Klee should we see such affirmations to involve the affirmation of chaos (sancta ratio chaotica) (1978a, 70). Indeed, we shall need—as did the later Merleau-Ponty—to understand consciousness as a matter of transcendence, its history as a matter of structured multiplicity, and thereby that there is transcendence, between theories, historical motivations, intentional encroachment (emptièment) and transformation—and precisely in these exchanges, development, justification, and right (droit) (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 185-187). Such, I have been arguing, is the lot of ‘surrealism’ and ‘phenomenology’ itself. Or as Merleau-Ponty put it in relation to Schelling, “He is seeking a Reason that is not prosaic, a poetry that is not irrational” (2003, 50).

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ters, to articulate their effect. Turning to Schelling in his final years to rearticulate this transcendence Merleau-Ponty declared, “this excess of Being over the consciousness of Being is what Schelling wants to think in all its rigor. Schelling tries to describe this ‘over-Being’ (Übersein, in the sense of the word ‘surrealism’ (ce ‘Sur-être’ Übersein, au sens du mot ‘Surréalisme’)” (2003, 38). Clearly the analogy, for reasons now evident, would not be merely an external one. But he also saw what was at stake in this attempt: “Schelling is trying for a non-prosaic conception of consciousness” (2003, 50).

Bibliography Adorno,Theodor and Walter Benjamin. 1998. The Complete Correspondence 1928-1949, trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Aichele, K. Porter. 2002. Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bachelard, Gaston. 1972. L’engagement rationaliste. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bataille, Georges. 1988. Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 1992. On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone. New York: Paregon House. ———.1994. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealismt, trans. Michael Richardson. New York: Verson. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Blanchot, Maurice. 1980. “Le ‘Discours Philosophique.’” L’arc. ———.1981. The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press. ———.1992. The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1995. The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Breton, André. 1972. Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor. New York: Harper & Row. Casey, Edward S. 2002. Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: 20th Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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de Beauvoir, Simone. 1968. The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Modern Library. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and other essays of Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1978. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. The Truth in Painting, trans Geoff Bennington, Ian McLeod. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1998a. “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” in Religion, Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1998b. Resistances: Of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, PascaleAnne Brault, Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1962. The Two and the One, trans. J.M. Cohen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fichte, J.G. 1982. Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon. ———.1977. Language, Counter Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. ———. 1983. This is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press. ———.1997. Aesthetics, Methodology, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Heard. New York: New Press. Franciscono, Marcel. 1991. Paul Klee: His Work and Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frank, Manfred. 2004. The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert. Albany: SUNY Press. Glaesemer, Jürgen. 1986.“Klee and German Romanticism,” in Paul Klee, Carol Lanchner (ed.). New York: Museum of Modern Art. Hegel, G.W.F. 1975. Aesthetics Vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin 1990. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Howells, Christina. 1990.“Sartre and the Language of Poetry” in David Wood (ed.) Philosopher’s Poets. London: Routledge. 140-152.

70 Stephen watson Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Jung, C.G. 1966. The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, trans. R.F.C. Hull. The Collected Works of C.J. Jung, vol. 15. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1967. Symbols of Transformation, trans. R.F.C. Hull. The Collected Works of C.J. Jung vol. 5. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1971. Psychological Types, trans. R.F.C. Hull. The Collected Works of C.J. Jung, vol. 6. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1990. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 9. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1963. On History, trans. Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. ———. 1987. Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluharn. Indianapolis: Hackett. Klee, Paul. 1964. Diaries of Paul Klee 1898-1918, trans. Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary, Max Knight. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1978a. Notebooks Vol. 1: The Thinking Eye, trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Lund Humphries. ———. 1978b. Notebooks Vol. 2: The Nature of Nature, trans. Heinz Norden. London: Lund Humphries. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. “Reality and its Shadow” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1971. Discours, Figure. Paris: Klincksieck. Marin, Louis. 1970. “Klee ou le Retour à l’Origine.” Revue d’Esthétique 23. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. New York: Humanities. ———. 1964. Signs, trans. Richard L. McClearey. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973. Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2003. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Rabinovitch, Celia. 2002. Surrealism and the Sacred. Cambridge, Mass.: Westview Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1947. “Un Nouveau Mystique,” Situations I. Paris: Gallimard.

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———. 1957. “Existentialism,” Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library. ———.1966. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. ———. 1968. The Psychology of Imagination, trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Washington Square Press. ———. 1978. What is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith. ———. 1992. Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schelling, F.W.J. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia. Stein, Gertrude. 1962. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. New York: Vintage Books. Van Der Leeuw, G. 1986. Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J.E. Turner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Watson, Stephen H. 1992. Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 1997. Tradition(s) I: Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2004. “Gadamer, Aesthetic Modernism and the Rehabilitation of Allegory: The Relevance of Paul Klee.” Research in Phenomenology 34. Werckmeister, O.K. 1982. “Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Angel of History” Oppositions 25. pp. 102-125. ———. 1985. Paul Klee in Exile 1933-1940. Himeji, Japan: Himeji Museum of Art.

3 Hermeneutics

Another Look & Other Questions

Ronald Bruzina

T

he approach I wish to take in my essay here is this: While hermeneutics is universally recognized as one of the major currents of intellectual work in the twentieth century, it is not always as clearly recognized how very different one “hermeneutics” can be from another, nor how the paradigm hermeneutical effort may have more in continuity and community with a philosophic current generally deemed its rival than is readily admitted. How this double direction of similarity and difference may pertain to the “hermeneutics” ascribed to Martin Heidegger—on the one hand showing his radical distinctness to other strands of hermeneutics, and on the other his close, even organic methodological linkage with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology—is what I think the full carrying out of the proposal I wish to make here would show. That said, all I can actually do is to sketch out the basics of the reading of texts in Heidegger’s corpus that begin this task, and to do so by focusing on what the issues were that, being engaged, resulted in each case—for both Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology—in the inauguration of an entire program, a whole philosophic undertaking that has yet to end. The way fundamental ontology eventually was pared down to a more radically focused thinking of being, to the event of being’s breaking into human history, is a wider topic that I shall have to leave aside. Here the focus will be on the way one prime element for Heidegger’s putting a “hermeneutics” at the center of philosophic interest was his having worked long and hard on issues within phenomenology. What matters most in this is not establishing philosophic doctrines—sets of conclusions having thesis-like definitiveness that provide the distinctiveness that enables us to  This, of course, is the task Heidegger takes up above all in Beiträge zur Phiolosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Heidegger 1989).

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separate such things as“phenomenology” and“hermeneutics,” and at the same time allow application to a wide range of disciplines. What matters most for understanding what either phenomenology and hermeneutics are is what the issue is that leads to each program of inquiry, how each program goes about investigating the elements that make up that issue, how the investigation refines and advances the understanding of that issue, and how the program allows self-critique to overcome naïveté and presuppositional elements that may still mark the achievements of its inquiry. What the issue in phenomenology was and is for the Husserl of phenomenology’s founding and what the issue was and is for the Heidegger in the hermeneutic restructuring of that phenomenology, and how the inquiry into each issue formed and proceeded through advance and self-correction—it is on this that I wish to focus. Obviously I cannot cover all this exhaustively in one paper. What I hope to do is at least to lay out certain key points in regard to the whole idea by proceeding in three movements: 1) treating the starting-point issue in Heidegger’s hermeneutic; 2) taking account of a retrospective from Heidegger’s last years done upon the early work that culminated in Being and Time; and 3) noting a fundamental difficulty in the program of “interpreting” Dasein.

1. Heidegger’s starting point issue in Being and Time: the beginning that came later We have to start with Being and Time because it is the statement of the first culmination in Heidegger’s own program in its difference from Husserl’s, namely, as the inquiry into being as such that is termed Hermeneutik, standardly rendered “hermeneutics” with the supposition it means straightforwardly a method of “interpretation.” The fact that Being and Time doesn’t begin Heidegger’s thinking on this but is the result of a long trajectory of effort makes it essential to understand Heidegger’s pronouncements on method in this book in terms of the kind of process from which they themselves result and within which they remain, at least some essentials of which will be laid out here. To begin, let us go straight to the central texts in Being and Time on phenomenology as Hermeneutik—“hermeneutics”—and first of all, to §7 C where the term is given for the first time in the book. There are two things to which to pay special attention in this portion of the book. The first is the way the driving issue of Being and Time is

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posed in terms of the problem lying in the situation of bringing something to show: How are we to bring something to show that cannot be brought to show except in terms of something else, where the thing to be brought to show is in the peculiar position of being neither the same as nor different from this second something via which to show this first thing itself. This, of course, is the issue of bringing Sein—“being”—to show when Sein (“being”) is precisely not something-that-can-show because, far from standing“behind” Seiendes—“something-that-is”—and thus hidden behind it, Sein as such is the very Sinn and Grund of ein Seiendes—the very sense and ground of a something-that-is. In point of fact, Sein (“being”) is not “a something” at all (Heidegger 1963, 35-36; 1996, 31), and therefore cannot be even characterized in terms of differentiating determinateness, in any kind of specific features. Sein is neither the same as nor different from Seiendes; it is both simply not like Seiendes (“something-that-is”) and yet “holds” of it (to use a questionable metaphor). Here is the situation within which phenomenology is to become Hermeneutik, to be not an ajpofansi~, a bringing to show, but rather, Heidegger writes, a eJrmhneuvein—which I shall leave untranslated for the moment— “through which [1] the proper sense of Sein and [2] the basic structures of Dasein’s own Sein are made known to the Sein-understanding belonging to Dasein itself.” And the very next sentence is the statement declaring the shift: “Phenomenology of Dasein is Hermeneutik in the original signification of the word, by which is designated the business of Auslegung” (Heidegger 1963, 37;1996, 33. Translation modified, italics in the original). Now, just what this “being made known”—kundgegeben werden— means as a task, as a procedure of advancing insight and self-critique, cannot be assumed to be grasped adequately here, or anywhere else in Heidegger—or indeed anywhere in Husserl—if we take the familiar words in either German or in any translation as already sufficiently clear for us to understand them in the designation they make in each case. If, for example, we straightforwardly take“interpretation” for either hermeneuein or Auslegung, we are likely to be misled; for the tendency is to take“interpretation” to mean basically, quite simply, to give a rendering  One could just as easily say Sein is not “inside” Seiendes, and hence hidden within it, but Heidegger doesn’t mention this here.  See also a similar point in Heidegger 1963, 152; 1996, 142.

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of an already formulated message of some kind so as to make clear the meaning of that message. But in the present situation what is at issue is precisely the fact that what is to be “made known” is not the meaning of some kind of message-like presentation or declaration; what is to be “made known” is something that has to be brought to “show” in some sense, and talk about it, or conceptualization of it, is wholly to serve this “showing” (as becomes clearer later in Being and Time, rather than in these early sections). Thus, for example, to think that because we have the word Sein we have a message-like declaration already on hand, but one that is waiting to be interpreted, would be already to overlook the methodological undertaking Heidegger is beginning to sketch out. That is, one has to begin here to grasp the manner in which to bring what is at issue—Sein— into clarity when the word for it is anything but a definite “message.” What we are told at this point in Being and Time is that, if we abide by the “original signification of the term,” hermeneuein is to be a “making known” in a quite general and noncommittal sense, a “setting out” of something that at that point is not yet “made known,” not yet “set out,” a setting out that will in the end “make” it “known” (kundgeben, which, while not designating any specific kind of cognition, can connote setting something into view for someone). And the“something” to be thus “made known” by being “set out” is the “proper sense of Sein,” which this same §7 C has just pointed out is the sort of thing that cannot show, even if the second thing at issue, “the basic structures of Dasein’s own Sein,” apparently is the sort of thing that can be brought to show. Whether this is actually so or not in the case of Dasein, and in what measure and manner it may be, remain to be seen as the study in the book unfolds, and in fact is not really something that can be settled in the present paper. What we have to do, then, is to let the meaning of hermeneuein or Auslegung come out more specifically and correctly as it unfolds in the course of the inquiry itself that is the program of Being and Time, and as the result of the way Heidegger proceeds there (including the way from time to time he speaks about how the task at hand is being done). In other words, the point of staying with the “original signification” of the first of these two terms, eJrmhneuvein, is to avoid being oriented in terms of possible presuppositional naïveté in what we take “interpretation” to mean. This very effort, now, to allow the investigation to determine the meaning of a term—here “interpretation” in its varieties of expression—which in fact already orients and guides the investigation, defines

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the procedure of investigation in phenomenology as such as Husserl practiced it before Heidegger, and after his relationship with him. Yet despite there being a measure of sameness in this point of method, Heidegger formulates it rather differently than Husserl, and he uses a variety of ways to describe it. In §2 of Being and Time this procedure in investigation is spoken of in terms of the way one formulates a question, with the main point for the present purpose the idea that “questioning needs antecedent guidance from what it seeks” (Heidegger 1963, 5; 1996, 4. Translation modified) even if what is sought is far from clear. In this case, the sense of “being” (Sein) is named as what is sought, but just to have the word for it, while indispensable, is not enough. Yet there must be some justification for the word in that what is sought is somehow indicated in the word, even if not clearly grasped in the sense that makes the word meaningful for us. In §31 where the existential structure of “understanding” is explicated, we are introduced to the term Entwurf—usually translated “projection”—as the always sketch-like anticipatory openness out to what is meaningfully to come as one continues to be, as one continues to “exist” in Heidegger’s technical sense of the word. And in §32 this always still “sketchy”“projection” of existential anticipation is spoken of as revisited in the way it can develop; and this development of “understanding” is termed Auslegung—again, “interpretation,” in its usual translation, but rather more nuanced than that. Here the process wherein an “antecedent conception”—Vorgriff— of something, already met with in one’s engagements, now gets taken up in order to “appropriate” it, to “make it one’s own [zueignen]” in one’s understanding of it, to make it comprehensible. This work of Auslegung, not simply acknowledgement of what is understood, but the “working out of possibilities sketchily projected” in one’s existential understanding (Heidegger 1963, 148; 1996, 139. Translation modified), can happen in two ways. In the Auslegung one can either force a meaning upon the something met with in a way contrary to the kind of being that something has—presumably by too rigid an adherence to the “antecedent conception” one has of it (Heidegger is not specific on this)—or one can “draw from the something-that-is,” which is thus to be “ausgelegt in the conceptuality belonging to it” (Heidegger 1963, 150; 1996, 141).  Entwurf in German carries both senses: project(ion) and sketch or outline.

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It is at this point that Heidegger speaks of the famous “hermeneutic circle,” that is, the way in which the anticipatory guiding “sketch-projection” gives inquiry its aim, but acquires its investigationally gained sense “aus den Sachen selbst,” Heidegger writes, “from the investiganda themselves” (as one might paraphrase it) (Heidegger 1963, 153; 1996, 142). Here it is clear that, far from being a rigid determinacy of meaning, the“sketch-projection” is the way an investigation is given aim and focus, the way in which that which is to be “made known” is provided with a concrete line of meaningfulness in terms of which to be “made known,” with the specifics of that meaningfulness coming by force of, i.e., developing from, “den Sachen selbst,” from the investiganda themselves. Here is where the parallel has to be made to the methodology in Husserl’s investigative procedure. There are two elements I have in mind, one the structural feature that is operative in Husserl’s investigations but mentioned by him only rarely, namely, the need to move in a “zig-zag” way, and the other the cognitive principle embodied in the situation of interplay between the “sketch-projection”-element and the “Sache selbst”-element, and given in the famous explicit declaration by Husserl of the “Principle of Principles.” On the first element: Husserl’s phenomenology is well-known for certain methodological features: epoché, reduction, egoic standpoint, and so on. But there is another feature at play in his investigations as the very dynamic of their movement, and which is directly relevant here, yet is so pervasive that it gets overlooked. It was formulated by Eugen Fink, Husserl’s assistant during the last ten years of his life, in draft notes for an introduction to what was originally conceived as an edition of Husserl’s Bernau manuscripts but which turned into a massive treatment of time and time-constitution meant to treat the whole problematic of time-analysis. Leaving aside the story of that undertaking, let me simply quote the compact characterizations Fink gives of the way Husserl’s phenomenology works:  Actually Heidegger’s first remarks on the circular structure of inquiry in Being and Time are in the first Introduction (1963, 7-8; 1996, 6) where the way one already thinks about being in previous ontology is characterized “as not in play availably as a concept,” i.e., as “that as [or: in terms of which] which it [i.e., Sein, being] is being sought” (in my somewhat paraphrastic renderings).  See Husserl’s characterization of the“zigzag” character of his investigations in volume 2 of his Logical Investigations, §6 (Husserl, 1970a); cf. note 7 below.

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With Husserl, his system grows out of the individual analyses. The paradoxical situation, that the concreteness of phenomenological philosophy lies in the manuscripts, which however first make possible the general systematic projections. On the other hand, it is only in the light of these projections that the more comprehensive relevance of the analyses can be seen. These systematic anticipatory perspectives guided things for Husserl. Work done following them sees itself referred to presentations of universal scope.(Fink n.d.,

2: B-I 40a)

And, the same thing is said again in a slightly different way, in the same set of notes: The peculiarity of Edmund Husserl’s way of working is that all systematic projections are not constructions that precede concrete investigations, rather they develop in the analyses. But that filled out analyses are made possible also results in the systematic projected design being broken open again, to gain thereby the characteristic of mobility. This is a fundamental characteristic of phenomenology—despite all its rigor [it is an] open system. (Fink n.d., 2:B-I 22a)

What is interesting and pivotal here is the characterization of two structural dimensions, that of the conceptions that guide an investigation and serve to unify and articulate its results, and that of the investigational analyses themselves—two interplaying factors that constitute the actual work in their interplay. It is the same pattern of interplaying factors I see in the method Heidegger is elaborating, though in largely different terminology and, a crucial point to develop shortly, with a sharply different focus and aim. And it remains to be seen how these two dimensions need further characterization when methodological self-critique enters the picture. The second element in Husserl’s phenomenology to mention, however, is the famous “Principle of All Principles” enunciated in his Ideas I as follows: “that every intuition that gives [its object] on the origin-level  The last designation gives the manuscript page, retained in the margins of the text as it is to be published. The syntactic incompleteness of the second sentence is not untypical of Fink’s notes.  Emphasis Fink’s, insertion in brackets mine. In more general expression, see also Fink 1995, 7-8. Cf. the near-parallel of the “zigzag” principle in Husserl 1970b, 58 (Husserl 1962, 59), there regarding the relation of origin to sensetradition but striking in its analogy to the present point.

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[originär] is a source of de jure validity [eine Rechtsquelle] for knowledge, that everything which is offered us in origin-level ‘intuition’ (so to speak, in “in the flesh” actuality), is to be accepted as what is given but only within the limits in which it is there given”(Husserl 1976, 51, §24). The point of citing this is to show that, even with the wide-ranging change of terminology on Heidegger’s part, the operative principle in his work is the same as Husserl’s in the following way: that what one gets to in one’s program of investigative “seeing”—in whatever way one conceives that “seeing,” that “insight,” as long as it is taken on the level and within the situation of that being which, doing the“seeing,” is constitutively, and in all its powers, in-the-world—is neither a fiction nor a mere mental projection, but “something-that-is” (Seiendes). This is the fundament of all possibility for both experience and philosophy, not to mention all science; and the point of a phenomenology, whether a “transcendental” one in Husserl’s manner or an “ontological” one in Heidegger’s, is to show that one cannot argue toward this realization as a conclusion, one’s work must show the necessity of beginning and remaining within it as the overarching constitutive condition of knowledge-capable human being as such. The “trick,” however, lies in the “showing” and the “seeing,” and that “showing” and “seeing,” I wish to argue, is built into what is the primary issue of Heidegger’s Being and Time. It is in consideration of this guiding cognitive principle embodied not only in Husserl’s conception of “intuition” but also in Heidegger’s effort to “make known” two matters, “[1] the proper sense of Sein and [2] the basic structures of Dasein’s own Sein,” that we can return to the consideration of Heidegger’s “hermeneutic” and begin to specify the focus and aim of his investigation in distinction from Husserl’s as well as in the distinctive characterization of a “principle of all principles” for his own progress, at least in the project of Being and Time. As we would move from Part 1, Division I in Being and Time to Division II, we should be struck by the way we actually witness there the interplay dynamic of what Fink finds as structuring Husserl’s “system” and his “way of working”—the interplay, namely, between guiding, sketch-like anticipatory projections and investigative analyses such that one advances the other, even while the advance has its grounding source in the “phenomenon” in question—in Being and Time: human being—under the guiding action of the “sketchy projection” of Dasein  My translation. For the concomitant feature of Evidenz, “evidentness,” see Husserl 1970a, (Prolegomena) §51.

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as existence. We even see Heidegger drawing our attention to this—in his own distinctive fashion, of course—in the opening remarks before Chapter 1 of Division II. Note the phrasing: “Ontological inquiry is a possible kind of Auslegung [“interpretation,” “laying out”] that was characterized as the working out and making one’s own of an understanding.” All the“preconceptions”—Voraussetzungen—all the“antecedent” takes on the matter of inquiry—Vorhabe, Vorsicht, Vorgriff—“that we have named the hermeneutical situation” have to be “clarified and secured beforehand from and within a fundamental experience of the object to be disclosed” (Heidegger 1963, 231-32, §45; 1996, 214. My translation). Here in these same paragraphs Heidegger emphasizes one ever-repeated necessity in the work of Being and Time, and gives technical designation to the way the “object to be disclosed” is got to in the inquiry situation. The constantly repeated need in Being and Time is to take the “idea of existence [die Idee der Existenz]” especially in the way existence is always a “can-be”—Seinkönnen—rather than as a mere “is,” always as mine (Heidegger 1963, 232 §45; 1996, 214-15). It is never some genus or kind of being that is in question, but an individualized—ultimately personalized—being: human being as me. Along with this we see a second technical point, that terming my human being Dasein or existence is given methodological specificity by being called “formal indication” (Heidegger 1963, 231 §45;1996, 214,). With these two notes we are already deep into the program of Being and Time in terms of the method for gaining access to that which is at issue, Sein as such, via that being for which being is the issue, human being as Dasein. It is in the analysis of the way human being as Dasein exists, in the integrated manifold of its constitutive structural complexity, that the “horizon [a very Husserlian term] for an interpretation [Interpretation] of the sense of being as such” is to be gained.”10 Otherwise put, it is via the laying out of the way Dasein exists that we shall be able to gain the proper setting for being able to catch sight of being as such. And here I wish to turn briefly to an effort of Heidegger’s to lay out a proper approach to (re)thinking being, via the analysis of human being, that preceded Being and Time by a few years, and then to a retrospective on this same overall effort offered by him a few years before his death. These are, first, his lectures in the summer of 1923 initially entitled “Ontology,” and secondly his remarks in the seminar conducted in his home at Zähringen in 1973. 10 Heidegger 1996, 13: title of §5 (1963, 15).

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What is said about Hermeneutik—“hermeneutics”—so compactly at various points in Being and Time is given an earlier much more detailed characterization in the 1923 lectures on “ontology” that Heidegger renamed “hermeneutics of facticity” as soon as it had begun. Rather than a full reading, however, let me simply give the points I think are most pertinent to the overall aim of the present paper. The first point is an observation about the fact that these lectures of Heidegger’s lie within the whole series of studies on his part that stretch from his dissertation to Being and Time. Heidegger’s effort to investigate the meaning of being had been under way for a long time, proceeding precisely in a repeated back-and-forth effort between a) conceptual formulations of what to focus on and b) what to look for in that focus. Moving back-and-forth here means simply constantly considering how the matter investigated in terms of guiding formulations leads to reassessing those same formulation in terms of what was found in the formulation-focused investigation; this in turn means looking at the same matter again under the reformulation, and so on. What we have here is actually neither a circle nor a back-and-forth movement, but something more like a spiral: a movement that changes with each return to modify, amplify, correct, and deepen an initial conception and question and the inquiry these spawn. It is clear that a process of this kind had been going on a long time before Heidegger sat down to put together the text of Being and Time. The way this book begins its inquiry is not the first beginning, but the recommencement that came after a number of renewed beginnings and that therefore can be better understood when the long process of earlier investigation is followed in its development. And, one has to add, the process did not and does not stop with Being and Time. The second point, now, in taking a look at the 1923 lectures is that Heidegger’s way of working there illustrates much that has just been said. In these lectures Heidegger makes clear that the decisive element in his program of inquiry is the “as what” in terms of which the matter to be inquired into is to be reached; and this “as what” is the very reason for his calling this inquiry Hermeneutik and the method it employs Auslegung. Here too, already, the matter to be inquired into is one’s own being, already named Dasein; and in 1923 Dasein is the main focus of inquiry because it is the kind of being “out of which and for which philosophy ‘is’,” in contrast to the way the approach to the problematic of being had been blocked by the work of previous ontology (Heidegger

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1995, 2). Much in these lectures anticipates the analysis of Dasein in Being and Time, but in subtlety, comprehensiveness and complexity Being and Time goes much further than the 1923 lectures. For our purposes, however, what is methodologically important is the way these lectures emphasize the very special character of this “hermeneutics” and “interpretation” precisely because of the nature of the “as what” in terms of which Dasein is at issue. The “as what” of this inquiry is “facticity [Faktizität].” More precisely, the facticity as which Dasein is to be approached means that my being is mine, and, again more precisely, jemeinig, in the sense that in its being (seinsmässig) my being, Dasein, is “there [‘da’].” This being of mine “is there to itself in the way it is its very own being to the utmost extent,” in the concretely circumscribed being that is the only way of genuinely being “there.”11 This “ownness,” Eigenheit, of facticity is not Einzelheit, isolated singleness, i.e., not solus ipse. It is rather the only “how of being” that is genuine to my being. This ownness, now, is what the “hermeneutic” action is to get me to. “Getting to one’s own being” is, in contrast to what hermeneutics earlier may have been, not a discussion of texts or propositions or any such complex of formulated meaning; its understanding is not a labor over generalities, but a hermeneuein, a Mitteilen—a communicating—an Auslegung (Heidegger 1995, 14) to myself of my own being as factic in my-ownness. It lives from, springs from, and draws from“a philosophical wakefulness [Wachsein] in which [my] being [Dasein] meets itself ”; and this situation of “meeting” oneself in being “there” in the living sense of being-there, is what “interpretation” amounts to—that is, self-interpretation, Selbstauslegung (Heidegger 1995, 18 and 20). At the same time, the methodological complex of this“communicating” and“encountering” in which my-own-being “meets” my-own-being—my own Dasein—as factically there, as my very own in the fullest temporally fluid concreteness, by way of “laid-out” or “interpretive” specification of the “as-what,” in sum, in its function the “laid-out,” “interpretive” formulation itself of this “as-what” in conceptually laden specific delineation (Darstellung), is named “a formal indication” (Heidegger 1995, 51). Accordingly, to concentrate on the content of this delineating formulation as such would 11 “… sondern Dasein ist ihm selbst da im Wie seines eigensten Seins” (Heidegger 1995, 7). One should note that at this point Dasein can be simply rendered my being, in that “Dasein” is not yet designated the name to be henceforth specific to my being as human being.

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be wholly to misunderstand things. That is not what “formal indication” is all about; it is not concerned with, as it were, mentally possessed knowledge about something. Instead, on the basis of the thus formulated indicative meaning, the functional point is“to bring understanding into the right line of sight (Blickbahn)” (Heidegger 1995, 80; also 18) via which to “meet” oneself experientially in one’s own being “there,” in one’s own Dasein. Summary as this restatement of one of the major points of the 1923 lectures is, it at least allows us to see what is at play in Being and Time in Heidegger’s “hermeneutics” precisely via the analysis of Dasein elaborated through that book. It is the very special effort, via words and meanings offering delineations to guide, in formal indication, the achievement of a“meeting,” under the guidance of a“seeing,” specifically a “seeing-as” (in some sense of “seeing”), that will disclose for oneself both a) what constitutes my being in its utmost concreteness precisely as my very own being, and also thereby (eventually) b) the sense of being as such. This is in play in the enormously complicated analyses of Dasein that are so familiar to us in Being and Time.12 And this programmatic aim, formulated so with greater care and precision in §7 C of Being and Time, is this methodology of “interpretation”—Hermeneutik and Auslegung—that distinguishes Heidegger’s sense of “hermeneutics” from the many meanings of these terms that come into currency after Being and Time. It is this special sense of “interpretation” that Heidegger specifies to which I shall return for critical observations in the final part of my treatment. To serve that purpose, however, I want to turn to the remarks Heidegger makes on the problematic of philosophically disclosing Dasein and being as such fifty years after the 1923 lectures, namely, in his 1973 Zähringen seminar.

12 In the Gesamtausgabe edition the term Dasein gets hyphenated: Da-sein, a spelling that is followed in Joan Stambaugh’s translation, which, given the sense the hyphenation can be taken to convey, to my mind only heightens the problem of the term that I shall briefly mention later in the third section. Indeed, in the “Translator’s Preface,” where Joan Stambaugh explains her following this practice in the Gesamtausgabe edition of the book (Heidegger 1977), she remarks that it was “Heidegger’s insight that human being is uncanny: we do not know who, or what, that is, although, perhaps precisely because, we are it” (Heidegger 1996, xiv).

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2. Retrospective upon the renewed beginning in Being and Time Jacques Taminiaux, drawing from the transcript of the Zähringen seminar written in French by the French participants though Heidegger spoke in German, drew attention thirty-seven years ago to Heidegger’s account of the crucial discovery he made on the basis of Husserls “Sixth Logical Investigation” (Taminiaux 1977). Heidegger realized that Husserl’s “categorial intuition,” intuition beyond, in excess of, the straightforward object-mode of givenness to take in the structural complexity of different kind of ensembles and wholes, whether entitative or situational, attested to a disclosure that could be taken as giving phenomenological validation of the “as it were”“givenness” status of being itself—as Heidegger terms it—namely, that beyond mere conceptual representation, being could be“made present, phenomenally present in the category” (Heidegger 1976, 315).13 Husserl, however, so Heidegger explains, never inquired into what the sense of being as thus “phenomenally present” might be, taking for granted that being meant simply “object-being” for a subject.14 In the seminar, then, Heidegger recounts briefly the trajectory through the reading of Plato and Aristotle that led eventually to the transposition of Husserl’s “givens in the dimension of sense” (données sensorielles, sinnliche Gegebenheiten) into the “givens” that matter in Being and Time. And in Being and Time what matters is the “given” of the whole situation within which a “consciousness” has its take on being, namely, the situation of the “lumen naturale” that in the first place allows any “looking (at)” something—regarder in the French, in the German version anschauen, which could also, in a less philosophically charged way, be translated blicken (auf/nach etwas). Here Heidegger makes an etymology-like remark upon the sense of re-garder, that it is a doing, 13 The French transcript in Heidegger 1976 was subsequently translated into German for the Gesamtausgabe edition (Heidegger 1986). The German version here seems to diminish the force of the French in rendering “cette mise en présence de l’être, présent dans la catégorie” by “dieser Vergegenwärtigung des Seins, das in der Kategorie phänomenal anwesend ist,” instead of a much stronger legitimate rendering, “Gegenwärtigung des Seins” (Heidegger1986, 378). 14 This charge of Heidegger’s against Husserl is criticized by Eugen Fink. See Bruzina 2004, 151.

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a “garder” (presumably in the usual meaning: watching over), in a way that turns it “back” (re-)—which, therefore, allows him to paraphrase regarder as “bringing myself to be approached by what I look at” (Heidegger 1976, 317). Here, then, Heidegger points to what “grounds”15 this regarder, this looking at: “the radical possibility for human being to cross an opening to reach things”; and this “being-in-an-opening” is precisely what is named Dasein—awkwardly named, Heidegger acknowledges, “but I did what I could” (Heidegger 1976, 317). Then, he immediately adds a second characterization of Dasein: “Dasein, one has to understand it as die Lichtung-sein: être l’éclaircie [being the clearing, the opening]. The ‘there’ is in actuality the word for the opening” (Heidegger 1976, 317).16 Now, leading up to this point—that Dasein is the “there” of the opening wherein “looking at” something can take place as reaching that something in its own being—this very “looking” is relegated to consciousness; for consciousness—Bewußtsein: conscious-being—is spoken of in terms of the power to see, vision being the paradigmatic action involved in “knowing [Wissen].” “Conscious-being moves in the dimension of seeing, where it is illuminated by the lumen naturale” (Heidegger 1976, 317). This is why regarder, looking (at) (blicken, anschauen), is spoken of as grounded by “being-in-an-opening,” and this “being-in-an-opening,” Heidegger points out, is what Being and Time names Dasein. Being-in-an/the-opening is what enables seeing and looking (at) to take place, but the opening itself is brought about in the very dynamic that constitutes Dasein, so that Dasein is also at the same time being the opening. In this way, too, Heidegger points out that “consciousness is rooted in Dasein, not the other way around” (Heidegger 1976, 317-18). But since seeing and looking (at) are so pivotal—and indeed they function in the very disclosure of being as the “excess” over object-like givens, not to mention (as we have seen) perhaps also in the very functioning of the hermeneutic/interpretive effort of the disclosure of being in Heidegger’s lectures and writings—the relation between being-conscious, Bewußtsein, and the being of human being, 15 The French for Heidegger’s word here is fonde, in the German translation, gründet. 16 The German expression given in the French transcript is presumably Heidegger’s own.

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Da-sein has to be examined, Heidegger admonishes. This is what the second session of the seminar takes up. In the second session now, summarily put, Heidegger takes Husserl’s consciousness (again, Bewußtsein) as “immanence” as if enclosure in a “box” and “without windows” (Heidegger’s metaphors). Da-sein is completely different. The Sein in Da-sein, in contrast to the Sein in Bewußt-sein, “conscious-being,” is not an interiorly held Sein but a Sein turned outward. “Da-sein strictly means: being ek-statically the there” (Heidegger 1976, 321-22).17 And if one is going to consider the intentionality of consciousness, one has to “situate it in the ek-stasis of Dasein. In a word, it has to be recognized that consciousness is founded in Dasein”—to repeat a point already made, with the operative word again fondée or gegründet (Heidegger 1976, 322).18 To finish my reading of these first two sessions of the Zähringen seminar, I cannot omit bringing in one last consideration of Heidegger’s, again from the second session, because it leads precisely to the problematic at the heart of my discussion. Heidegger adds a remark in which he says: “today I would formulate the relationship differently. I would not speak simply of ek-stasis, but of Inständigkeit in der Lichtung, [instancy in the clearing (or: opening)],” a turn of expression that Heidegger explains as “the unity of two meanings”: “1) holding the three ek-stases in balance; 2) sustaining and enduring being across the entirety that is beingthe-there.” This Inständigkeit in der Lichtung, “instancy in the clearing (opening),” is a linguistic formula huge with implications that, so far as I know, are largely unsuspected;19 and one should know that the term Inständigkeit occurs with some frequency in Heidegger’s Beiträge, both in noun and adjective form (with variations).20 The point, however, of 17 The discussion of Bewußtsein and Dasein running from pp. 318 to 325. The hyphenation of “Da-sein” is in the French text. 18 See the first mention of these terms in note 15. 19 In a sense developed rather differently, and apparently earlier—though not unrelatable to the one here—the German term, given in German in the French transcript, is in fact one of the principal expressions involved in Eugen Fink’s “meontic” in the self-critical methodology of transcendental phenomenology. Rather than treat this point here, I have to refer to the full discussion of it in my book, section 5.1.1.2 (among others) and chapter 7 (Bruzina 2004) 20 The longest consideration is in number 174, which parallels the point made here in Heidegger 1976.

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this phrase—Inständigkeit in der Lichtung—both in its context in the 1973 seminar and in Heidegger’s Beiträge (Heidegger 1989), is the way it affects how one considers, not simply the relation of consciousness to Da-sein, but the relationship of human being and Da-sein. This is something catching our notice when we see two closely related, but quite different statements. A little later in the second session Heidegger remarks in regard to the “clearing,” the “Lichtung,” this “free dimension [diese Freie],” that “man is not the creator of it, man is not it. On the contrary, it is that which is destined for him, which addresses itself to him: It is that which is consigned to him”—a clause that in the French transcript is given in German: “Es ist das ihm zugeschickte” (Heidegger 1976, 324-25). The other kind of remark follows shortly after, when the discussion turns to Marx, whose main thesis in regard to human being Heidegger puts as the idea that “the man who is his own root to himself is indeed the man of production-consumption”—and the process of production-consumption had just been discussed in the seminar. To this idea Heidegger offers a counterpoint: “But man understood as Da-sein, as ek-static instancy in the clearing of being, is the opposite of the thesis Marx declares.” Nor can one say, Heidegger insists, that “Da-sein is the root of man” because the concept of “root” is utterly incapable of conveying “the relationship of man to being” (Heidegger 1976, 327). One may well suppose that here Heidegger is also offering a corrective clarification in regard to his earlier remark that “being-conscious, consciousness, is rooted in Dasein.”21 I shall be returning to this seeming correction again, this caution and indeed rejection of “root”-terms for characterizing the place of Dasein in regard to human being.

3. The difficulty of conceptually indicating—i.e., “interpreting”—the ontological structure of Dasein/Da-sein—or ultimately of being as such We now have some basic elements for returning to the methodological structure of Heidegger’s Hermeneutik and Auslegung in Being and Time in terms of 1) the issue: the sense of being, 2) the avenue of inquiry for approaching this issue, namely, the ontological analysis of human being as Dasein/Da-sein, and 3) the main problems lying in all this. 21 See the above reference on p. 14 to Heidegger 1976, 317-18.

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To take all this up properly in such a way as to show both the continuity with Husserl’s phenomenology and the transformation that this phenomenology undergoes in Heidegger’s work on the one hand, and the methodological issues that similarly continue from Husserl and get transformed in Heidegger’s investigations on the other—and my interest is really in these methodological issues—would require a close reading of a number of places in Being and Time that we simply could not do in the compass of this paper. As a result, at this point I shall have to offer an overview, a summary of what I see to be in play in this whole problematic. Let me first speak again of the differentiation that the Zähringen seminar indicates between human being and Da-sein.22 The differentiation emerges in the difference between speaking of Dasein as “in” the clearing, in the “there,” and as unqualifiedly simply being the clearing, being the “there.”23 The first designation speaks of that which is enabled in the clearing to stand open to something standing forth to it therein as something-that-is, while the second speaks of the dynamic of opening the clearing as such, the “originative” factor enabling something-that-is to stand forth in disclosedness to that which is open to it. In Being and Time, Dasein is asserted as both, constitutively, unqualifiedly: Dasein is the kind of being that human being has precisely in deploying the “there” of disclosure in the dynamic of its temporalized existence, the disclosure both to itself of itself as Dasein in its being, and of all that Dasein in the dynamic of its existence brings to be as the complex of the sense-laden referential vectors that make up the world in the “there” of Dasein’s engaged realization of its Seinkönnen—of its aiming ever forward into what it “can-be.” In the Zähringen discussion, human being clearly has functions that are themselves directly dependent upon the “there” of the clearing, in particular the power of seeing—the mode of sensuous consciousness that we name vision, the intentional opening out into the clearing that envelops it and enables its intentional thrust, 22 It is a differentiation that is earlier explicitly indicated in Heidegger 1989, where Inständigkeit is itself focused on in number 174 and further discussed in the numbered sections that follow, 175 and 176. There are many other passages as well where more or less equivalent usages of noun or adjectival inständig- or inständlich-words occur. 23 This is what could make for a distinction between Dasein and Da-sein, partially at least disambiguating the ambiguity, but Heidegger’s usage does not seem to allow any such clear contrast.

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thereby to see what is there, in the “there.”24 We have to note too that this parallels the 1923 lectures on “hermeneutics,” where the forcefully pronounced feature of facticity—the this-way in which an actual human being is contingently concrete at any time in its existence—is an intrinsic feature in function of all the circumscribing particulars in play right then in the field of being, namely, in the world. Yet, in contrast to the Zähringen seminar, Heidegger in these 1923 lectures makes explicitly clear that in the concrete this-way facticity of human being in its constitutive placement in the field of being—the disclosure of which becomes, in the project of Being and Time, the way to “make show” being itself—human being is Dasein. For example, Heidegger writes in italicized emphasis: “Dasein (factic life) is being [Sein] in a world” (Heidegger 1995, 80). This disaccord between a) Heidegger’s 1923 lectures, along with the continuing unqualified identity of Dasein with human being-inthe-world in Being and Time, and b) Heidegger’s partial decoupling of Dasein and human being in the 1973 Zähringen seminar, relates closely, now, to the second point that has to be raised about this whole problematic: namely, regarding the nature of the investigational operation by which on the one hand the “there,” the “clearing” itself, and on the other hand the being that is this clearing—that is the world simply put—are together brought to be “seen”; for seeing all this is the whole point of the operation of “Auslegung,” “interpretation.” Can all this in fact be “seen”? And in what kind of “seeing” (and disclosure, “showing”) is this to be done? Here precisely is where a joint reading of Heidegger on “interpretation” and Husserl on “categorial intuition” would be both 24 The distinction I am pointing to in the Zähringen seminar (Heidegger 1976) no doubt reflects Heidegger’s long, involved, fragmentary thinking in Beiträge (Heidegger 1989), though it is also discernible earlier yet; but in Beiträge Heidegger does not discuss vision as a power of human being that suggests distinction from Dasein. The context of Husserl’s Logical Investigations is what in Zähringen leads to consideration of vision and consciousness. The 1923 lectures, however, are equally clear on distinguishing the cognitional character of consciousness and intentionality (presumably as paradigmatically analyzed by Husserl) from the ontological character of the very procedure of Auslegung that Heidegger is setting out to practice; Auslegung, and the understanding that is achieved in it, are themselves a form of the facticity that is characteristic of the being of Dasein. Indeed, Heidegger speaks of Auslegung as an exceptional form of this facticity (Heidegger 1989, 15).

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interesting and helpful in its contrasts and similarities; but I shall not undertake that here. I shall have to restrict myself only to certain general remarks about it. In the 1923 lectures the specific means for achieving this “seeing” is “formal indication [die formale Anzeige]”; and the paradigm case of “formal indication” is the sentence just quoted: “The anticipatory hold in which Dasein (at every moment one’s own Dasein) stands in this investigation, can be expressed in formal indication: Dasein (factic life) is being in a world” (Heidegger 1995, 80). Heidegger is explicit about what formal indication is supposed to achieve in this seeing: “[This kind of ] delineation is already a first indication that brings out the being-characteristic [of Dasein], or otherwise put a formal indicating for seeing ontologically” (Heidegger 1995, 51).25 But this seeing is not supposed to be done in any way as a shift out of the “this-way” concreteness level of that which is thus “got” in “view” ontologically. Not long after beginning the lectures Heidegger writes: “Hermeneutics is really supposed to aim not at getting knowledge [Kenntnisnahme], but at existential recognizing [Erkennen], that is, [it aims at] a being [ein Sein]”; it is to be a “way of recognizing that is [itself ] a way of being in factic life” (Heidegger 1995, 18). Now, in Being and Time, we saw Heidegger in §7 C speak not of a “seeing,” but rather of a “showing” of something that otherwise is concealed, a “showing” that is spoken of as the aim of the investigation in other terms as well, namely, as“making something known”—kundgeben. Nevertheless, there are clear parallels to such passages as the above cited from 1923. For example: Under the “interpretive” “laying out” in articulations meant to aim our inquiry into 1) “the proper sense of Sein” and 2) “the basic structures of Dasein’s own Sein,” Heidegger adds in the very same sentence in §7 C that this “making known” is to be provided “to the Sein-understanding belonging to Dasein itself.” In other words, the understanding at work here is precisely the kind of understanding, the Seinsverständnis, that is constitutive of Dasein at the level of the existential dynamic that is being described in the book.26 The problem is that I find disingenuous this insistence that the work of the 25 Supplementary phrases are my insertions from the context. 26 Parallel characterizations of it are given, for example, in Chapter 6, Part 1, Division I, especially §39 (especially Heidegger 1963, 181-82; 1996, 169-70), and in Chapter 3, Part 1, Division II, §65 (especially Heidegger 1963, 328; 1996, 301-2). One might add here that the insistence on Heidegger’s part

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“hermeneutic/interpretive/laying-out” of guidance for the situation of “making known” or“showing” and its corresponding“meeting” or“seeing” is itself without qualification operatively identical in its elements with the existential situation of existential Seinsverständnis being analyzed in that work. It is not because I think the structural whole of existential Seinsverständnis being analyzed in the analysis cannot be taken as absolutely fundamental to the analyzing task itself; it is rather that, however much the aim is “formal indication” for just this kind of existential “take” in existential understanding, there is an awful lot of consideration of the meaning of formulations going on, along with the right and the wrong of them, especially in regards to Heidegger’s predecessors in philosophy, and I do not see sufficient consideration given to how all that conceptualizing itself has its efficacy for the guidance it offers to “formal” indicating—not to mention a role for perceptual orientations “in the clearing,” of the sort that Heidegger, as we saw, allows for as the “intentionality” of ordinary modes of “consciousness,” such as vision, in the “there” of the opening. Surely there has to be more analysis of how this all works, not as the terminus ad quem—a status clearly rejected by Heidegger—but as the register of the “terminus per quem” (if I may coin the term), that in terms of which to reach the terminus ad quem, factic Dasein, namely, the register of various existentials and of the totality of existential structure. Actually there are hints of this in Being and Time, but I shall not be able to take them up here.27 Instead, let me become even more summary in what I see to be the problem and its source, and what can be said in addressing it. For one thing, much turns on just how the distinction of human being from Dasein/Da-sein would be made, how the ambiguity clearly implies that a distinction should be made between the Verständnis of Seinsverständnis and the Verstand of ordinary intellectual operations. 27 Adapting Heidegger 1996, 58 (Heidegger 1963, 62) to this issue, perhaps one could say that the conceptual work serving the formal indicative work of Being and Time, as a capacity for thematic, conceptually explicitated “knowing [Erkennen],” is “a new stance in being [Seinsstand] toward the world already discovered in Dasein.” Heidegger seems to mean this new “stance of being” as a legitimating of scientific study, but mutatis mutandis there seems no reason why it could not cover also the thematic, conceptuality-governed cognition, as has been implemented in much of traditional philosophic method, including Husserl’s, though this itself is not exactly traditional in many ways (as Heidegger himself allows).

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of their identity and difference is to be resolved (if it can be resolved!) The close identity of the two in Heidegger’s work does not seem to allow differentiating an ontological sense of understanding from a legitimate gnoseological sense for understanding.28 It seems reasonable to think that legitimate operations of“being-conscious”—consciousness—would (as it seems it must) be admissible within the philosophic inquiry into Dasein (and the question of the sense of being) if human being did not so unqualifiedly have the duties of “being the there” in all one’s existential performances. Are in fact all one’s own efforts at understanding as a working, living philosophic scholar and thinker really and unqualifiedly ipso facto “acts” of Dasein/Da-sein within oneself in the capacity of the functioning projectionist of the “there” and the clearing? Can they not rather be a far more human occupation that, taking place in the realm—in the “clearing”—that Heidegger suggests is enabled by the “power” of Dasein/Da-sein, cannot be thought in terms of being that performing, enabling power? Yet, whether this is the case or not—and in point of fact something like this is what I think in the end one must hold, on both Heideggerian “thinking-of-being” terms and Husserlian“transcendental phenomenological” terms—there is a problem relating directly to this same question that lies in the whole enterprise of Heidegger’s project that I now finally want to pose. And I want to do so following upon Heidegger’s own clarification that the relation of the realm of effort on the part of being-conscious to Dasein/Da-sein could not be properly put in terms of the language of “rooting.” I shall not claim the credit for the critical point that has to be made here and that amounts to a radicalizing of the qualification Heidegger makes. And it doesn’t come from Heidegger. The critical point comes from someone who knew Heidegger very well, and Husserl equally well, and who to my mind grasped each better than either Heidegger or Husserl was capable of doing in regard to the other. The middle term in this philosophical situation, and history, is Eugen Fink, not so much because of his personal and philosophical involvement with both of them, quite different in each case, but because of the critical stance he was able to take on each, both from the standpoint of each with regard to the other and from a standpoint that developed out 28 I avoid saying“cognitional” simply because of Heidegger’s near total dismissal of cognition as, in effect, unredeemable from its entrenchment in philosophy of reflection, most notably for him in Husserl, and certainly as having no place in the work of Being and Time.

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of the inherent capacities of the two philosophical undertakings in their interplay. Already in notes from 1931 or 1932 Fink had observed what he called Heidegger’s“luminary theory of subjectivity” in his conception of “transcendence.” And the image for it is striking: “Only on the basis of light is there flame and is it seen. The flame becomes visible in its own light” There is a paradox, perhaps even an “internal contradiction,” here in Heidegger’s ontology that is formulated more technically in another of Fink’s notes around 1931, as follows: if “‘transcendence’ is the intrinsic essence of ‘Dasein’,” and “transcendence as being-understanding makes possible the being of that-which-is,” then, since “a human’s relating to oneself as to something-that-is is grounded in transcendence,” then “transcendence cannot be [itself ] something-that-is.” And yet in this ontology transcendence belongs constitutively to human being (Fink n.d., 1: Z-IX 31a, Z-XV 103a-b).29 In a plainer way of putting it, if Dasein is the power the existential thrust of which sets up and deploys the world as the opening in which not only a being other than Dasein but Dasein itself are each something-that-is (ein Seiendes), then Dasein is the origination both of the condition of the clearing for the disclosure (manifestness) of any being as a being, and of the conditioned status in which it stands in its own being as set within that same disclosure clearing which it originates. It is both the ultimate ontological condition for being in the clearing of the world, and ipso facto a being conditioned within that clearing. Is there not, therefore, something incoherent, or at least methodologically problematic, about the analytic of Dasein that poses it as both a being—Seiendes—specifically human being, and the there for the disclosure of every being—of every Seiendes, including itself? How is it that the analytic terms for analyzing human being can in principle apply, even as “formal indication” (and not simply as adequate conceptualization), to that which is the condition for any such application, viz., for the disclosure of anything as anything? Here is the fundamental reason for rejecting the term “root” as simply inapplicable, but that reason holds as well as for such terms as“foundation,” or“ground,” used in the Zähringen seminar. These also really apply only to what is within the clearing and cannot express either its status or role or the factor of its origination. 29 Insertion in brackets mine. The folder Z-IX also contains as a point of reference notes on Heidegger’s winter semester 1931-32 lectures “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” (Heidegger 1997).

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In point of fact, Fink posed the question analogously with equal trenchancy to Husserl for transcendental phenomenology, the statement of which, and Husserl response to it, is exhibited explicitly in Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method—with the difference that we know pretty well what Husserl thought about it. He saw the point, and he responded to it by integrating at least some considerations into his own thinking—but that is another story. It is not clear that Heidegger ever heard Fink offer his critique with equal explicitness, though in fact it is in play in the only recorded discussion involving both of them, the seminar in Freiburg from the winter semester of 1966-67 under the title Heraklit (Heidegger and Fink, 1970). But that, too, would merit another examination. Right now the point is this: There is serious question whether or not the status of Dasein in Being and Time, and beyond, is able to free itself from this difficulty—such as would be the case if there is a way to disclose how the “clearing” takes place other than in terms of an analysis of human experience in the world, precisely in its concrete facticity. Nevertheless, under the supposition that the conditioning-conditioned status of Dasein has central relevance—and I certainly have not given a full rendering of its legitimacy—one consequence is this: While the status and sense of being as such remains still unexamined as Being and Time comes to an end, to be taken up with strenuous, if not torturous subtlety and obscurity thereafter in Beiträge, Dasein seems to shift in sense only indirectly, by allusion rather than by way of reinvestigative elucidation. Yet on the other hand Being and Time, with Dasein in its ambiguous double status, remains a constant point of beginning and anchorage for Heidegger, and even more so for his ardent followers. In actuality I do not think this constancy is unmerited, but I also think the case for its entire legitimacy is yet to be fully made. Unfortunately I shall not be trying to make it today and must leave that for other work under way.30 For now I want to turn to some final consequences of the validity, again supposed rather than demonstrated, of this last critical point I’ve been raising. If this critique holds, then the idea that Dasein precisely as the “there” of the clearing, as the“originative” power (or if one wishes, the“deploying” power) that enables the opening to happen (perhaps conceived as the factor of a) Dasein/Da-sein in b) human being, if a distinction between 30 In particular it is part of the corollary considerations in my Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink, especially Chapter 7 (Bruzina 2004).

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these two is allowed) is precisely the sort of thing that defies adequate characterization, delineation, conceptualization, and indication; and, if so, it could be in no way analogous to Husserl’s “categorial forms” that are givable in intentional, “intuitional” gnoseological grasp, in that all such grasp takes place in principle within the clearing, within the “there,” within the horizon of the world. In what way, then, could any such thing as the being of Dasein as the being of the “there” come to be given, indicated, or thought of in specific meanings—on the principle that all such operations are intrinsically conditioned within the clearing, the “there,” the horizon of the world?31 It seems to me that there is one feature of Heidegger’s analytic of “formal indication” that, even under the supposition of the legitimacy of the critique I have just sketched out, might still have a role as a possible of addressing this. And it is this: The way Seinsverständnis works as an understanding is by a kind of existential operativeness, that is, by way of the movement of the dynamic of existing. It is not an intentional cognition or intentional thought or reflection; it is a thrust of existing that ipso facto makes sense to itself—perhaps in the manner in which Husserl’s analysis of temporality shows its retentional-protentional structure as ipso facto a kind of self-awareness, conceivably of a performative-pathic sort. And given the role of temporalization as the very structure of the being of Dasein, it would not be implausible for this to be so for Heidegger, although he has not himself pronounced on it in these terms. But if this is so, then it makes sense for Heidegger to speak of the necessity for Dasein’s“meeting” of itself in the philosophic“seeing” guided by the “formal indication” of hermeneutic procedure to remain in the mode of an experience of the factic being of Dasein.32 It would be as if one doesn’t “see” the structures that are given formulation to enable 31 Here one would have to return to the question whether indeed this is the very reason that Dasein has to be conceived in conditioning-conditioned ambiguity, for which a logic of intelligibility would need to be worked out. 32 This is the character of it in the 1923 lectures: “The how of being opens and delimits the ‘there’ possible at each moment. Being—transitive: be factic life!” (Heidegger 1995, 7). Or again, as quoted earlier, p. 22: “Hermeneutics is really supposed to aim not at getting knowledge [Kenntnisnahme], but at existential recognizing [Erkennen], that is, [it aims at] a being [ein Sein]”; it is to be a “way of recognizing that is a way of being in factic life” (Heidegger 1963, 18). And a bit later, beyond the lines quoted from the same text: “The wakefulness is philosophic, which means: it is living in an original self-interpretation

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them to be “made known” to one’s philosophic realization, so much as “sense” them, again, in the very operation of being—if one could allow this dangerous word “sense” into the Heideggerian linguistic economy. And yet, despite the standard renderings in English of Sinn as “meaning,” which neutralize its otherwise constant sensuous connotation, Heidegger’s regular use of this word Sinn and not Bedeutung in regard to what is to be “made known” via hermeneutic “formal indication” maintains a less optic and visual, a less intellectualistic connotation of the word “sense” that is diminished by translating it as “meaning”. I do not think this use of Sinn is accidental, even if it may be out of familiarity with and sensitivity to language more than from an explicit philosophic conception. The difficulty with this, however, is that Heidegger means the“experience” here to be articulative, that is, to be the grasp of something in the complexity of its structure; that is the whole point of “formal indication.” But then here one has to distinguish between grasping the whole as a whole, complex as it may be, and grasping as such the structural complexity of the whole. This is analogous to the distinction in Husserl between perceiving a categorially structured object and perceiving the structural categoriality of the object. It seems to me Heidegger is ambiguous on this matter. It would be one thing for “formal indication” to lead to grasping the complex whole that is Dasein, and another to grasp the structural complex of the whole that is Dasein. Which it is that, for example, the Augenblick—the moment of (in)sight—in §65 of Being and Time is meant to grasp needs to be determined: Is making Dasein “known” as the full, temporally structured, complex wholeness of Dasein a matter of making “known” to myself my finite, factic Dasein grasped globally as a whole, or is the complex, temporally integrated existential structure itself of Dasein that which is to be “made known” as such? In the latter we have a clear analogue to Husserl’s “categorial intuition,” the point of which is precisely to grasp what Husserl calls a “higher order” of “object.” But, again, under either answer, the question that has to be raised remains: how can this kind of “given” be construed as a being the very being of which is the “there” in which ultimately it is realized? It has to be either an achievement with a methodological character perhaps able to be made clear (perhaps along some of the lines outlined here), [Selbstauslegung] that philosophy has given itself of itself …” (Heidegger 1963, 18). Cf. also the opening paragraphs of Heidegger 1963, §65.

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or it is an exceedingly elusive capability that seems to call for simple acceptance and belief. As I leave the matter here in this form, what I hope is clear is that the issue that motivated Heidegger’s distinctive “hermeneutics,” radical as no other hermeneutic program is, remains very much an issue. I hope I have succeeded at least in showing how that issue can become more distinct in its important constitutive elements as we study it both in its development in Heidegger’s texts, and in the context of the work of others closely associated with him.

Works cited Bruzina, Ronald. 2004. Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-38. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fink, Eugen n.d. Die letzte phänomenologische Werkstatt Freiburg: Eugen Finks Mitarbeit bei Edmund Husserl, Manuskripte und Dokumente, Bd. 1-2, ed. Ronald Bruzina. Freiburg: Alber Verlag (forthcoming). ———. 1995. Sixth Cartesian Meditation, the Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Trans. Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1963, Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. ­­­———. 1976. Questions IV. Trans. Jean Beaufret, François Fédier, Jean Lauxerois and Claude Roëls. Paris: Gallimard, ———. 1977. Sein und Zeit. Gesamtausgabe 2, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1986. Seminare. Gesamtausgabe 15, ed. Curd Ochwadt. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1989. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1995. Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität. Gesamtausgabe 63, ed. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1996. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: State University of New York Press. ———. 1997. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet. Gesamtausgabe 34, ed. Hermann Mörchen. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin, and Eugen Fink. 1970. Heraklit, Seminar Wintersemester 1966/1967. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Also published in Heidegger 1986, 5-266. Husserl, Edmund. 1962. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie; Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische

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Philosophie. Husserliana 6, ed. by Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. (1970a) Logical Investigations, Vol. 1-2. Trans. John Findlay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. (1970b) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology; An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1976) Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch:Allgemeine Einfurung in die reine Phänomenologie. Husserliana 3/1, ed. Karl Schuhmann. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Taminiaux, Jacques 1977. “Heidegger and Husserl’s Logical Investigations; In remembrance of Heidegger’s last seminar (Zähringen, 1973).” Research in Phenomenology 7. 58-83. Also published as “Le regard et l’excédent. Sur Heidegger et les ‘Recherches logiques’ de Husserl.” Revue philosophique de Louvain 75 (1977). 74-100.

4 Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot: A Phenomenological Reading

Hans Rainer Sepp First act, country road, “A tree. Evening.” (6) Estragon sits on the ground to lace his shoes. Vladimir appears. They rejoice seeing each other again. Estragon spent the night in a ditch and was again beaten. Vladimir bumps out his hat. Eventually, Estragon manages to remove his shoes. Vladimir once more wants to tell Estragon the often repeated story of the two butchers around Jesus on the cross. “It’ll pass the time.” (9) But Estragon constantly interrupts him with questions. They cannot leave this place. So Vladimir says, “We’re waiting for Godot.” (10) Even Estragon’s attempts to tell Vladimir his dreams of anxiety come to naught and his request to Vladimir to tell the story “of the Englishman in a brothel” is not met (11). Eventually even Estragon’s question “What about hanging ourselves?” ends up in playful arguments (12). Vladimir believes he heard a scream. Estragon asks him for a carrot, which he would prefer to the turnip. Then a loud scream is heard close by: Pozzo leads Lucky in a leash cracking his whip. Lucky has a rope around the neck and carries a suitcase, a stool, a picnic basket and a coat on his arm. Lucky falls to the ground. Pozzo screams at him and is given the coat, the stool, and the picnic basket. He sits down, eats a chicken leg and drinks wine. Vladimir and Estragon look at Lucky with curiosity, while Estragon contemplates with avidity the chicken bone Pozzo gnawed and threw away. After Lucky, for whom the leftovers were meant, as Pozzo explains, does not accept them, Estragon jumps to the bone. “It’s a scandal,” Vladimir immediately exclaims pointing to Lucky, “to treat a man ... like that.” (18) Pozzo, who fills in his pipe for the second time, remains undisturbed. Vladimir wants to go, but Pozzo reminds him of what will happen with the appointment with Godot.  Pagination taken from The Collected Works of Samuel Beckett, vol. 5, Waiting for Godot: a tragicomedy in two acts. Translated from the French by the author. New York: Grove Press. Collected Works 1970, Originally 1954.

102 Hans rainer sepp Vladimir asks him,“Who told you?” but Pozzo ignores the question. Estragon asks why Lucky does not put the suitcase down. Stretching, Pozzo answers that Lucky wanted to impress him and he just wants to wear him out. Pozzo explains that he wants to bring Lucky to the fair and sell him. Lucky cries, Pozzo extends a hankerchief to Estragon: “Comfort him, since you pity him.” (21) Estragon wants to wipe away Lucky’s tears, but Lucky kicks him in the shins. Estragon’s pain leaves Pozzo undisturbed. Vladimir, turning to Lucky: “It’s abominable! Such a good master! To crucify him like that!” (23) Pozzo continues, Lucky was nice to him, “and now ... he’s killing me!” (23) Vladimir withdraws and leaves the stage, but comes back shortly after: “Will night never come? ... Time has stopped.” (24) Estragon examines his shoe, Vladimir his hat. Lucky is half asleep and his hat falls down. With big gestures Pozzo describes the approach of dusk and the nightfall. When Estragon notes that “in the meantime, nothing happens,” Pozzo asks Lucky for some diversion (26). “Shall we have him dance, or sing, or recite, or think, or —” Vladimir wants to see Lucky think, Estragon wants to see him dance (26). Lucky puts down his suitcase and dances. Pozzo wants to say something and loses the thread of his thought. Then Vladimir and Estragon take off their hats and concentrate. To Estragon’s question why Lucky does not put down the suitcase, Vladimir responds that he has in fact put it down. Pozzo’s further attempts to reflect remain unsuccessful. Vladimir asks him to make Lucky think. After Vladimir puts the hat back on Lucky’s head, as Pozzo asked him to do, Lucky begins an incoherent monotonous talk. The unhappiness of the audience increases until it finally lashes at Lucky. Vladimir takes again Lucky’s hat and Lucky keeps silent and drops to the ground. On Pozzo’s orders, Estragon and Vladimir help Lucky stand up. Pozzo gives him the pieces of luggage and leaves the stage, cracking his whip and driving Lucky by the rope in front of him. Estragon notes that Pozzo and Lucky have changed each other quite a bit. “Only we can’t.” (32) When Estragon wants to turn his attention to his other painful foot, a boy breaks the news that Mr. Godot will not come this evening, but certainly tomorrow morning. After the boy leaves, the night falls quickly and the moon rises. Vladimir says: “At last!” (34) Estragon has taken off his shoes; he could walk barefoot like Jesus. Both look at the tree and regret not to have a rope. It would have been better if each of them had gone his own way, but now it is no longer worth it to leave each other. Estragon: Well, shall we go?

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot: A Phenomenological Reading Vladimir: Yes, let’s go. They do not move. (35) Second act.“Next day. Same time. Same place.” (36) Estragon’s shoes lie on the forestage, Lucky’s hat still lies on the ground. Vladimir enters the stage, walks around, looks at the horizon, starts singing, walks around. Estragon comes along barefoot. Vladimir asks Estragon whether someone has beaten him. Estragon responds that Vladimir has let him go. They hug. Estragon:“Another day done with.” Vladimir: “Not yet.” (38) Vladimir is satisfied today and he, Estragon, should also be satisfied. Vladimir points to the tree, but Estragon does not remember any more that they wanted to hang themselves from this tree the day before. Estragon has vague recollection of Pozzo and Lucky, but cannot remember having encountered them yesterday at the same place. It is not sufficient for dead voices to have lived: “they have to talk about this.” (40) In order to think, Vladimir says, confront yourself with corpses, with a charnel-house. Estragon says: “We should turn resolutely towards Nature.” (42) Vladimir shows Estragon again the tree which has since yesterday gained its leaves. Estragon denies that they are at the same place. He can only remember the leftovers of the meal and the kick, and the shoes are not his either. Estragon:“What’ll we do, What’ll we do?” (44) Vladimir gives Estragon a black radish, who besides carrots only like pink radishes. Vladimir helps Estragon to put on his shoes. They sit. Vladimir sings Estragon to sleep and then walks around. Estragon is frightened, both walk around the stage arm in arm. Vladimir sees Lucky’s hat, he was thus not mistaken about the place. He takes Lucky’s hat and gives his own to Estragon. Several times they exchange hats. Finally, Vladimir puts on Lucky’s hat, throws his away and says they could play Pozzo and Lucky. But Estragon, for whom these names evoke nothing, only half plays. Estragon leaves. Vladimir orders himself to dance, sees that Estragon is no longer there and emits a heartrending scream. He runs on the stage, Estragon comes running along. Estragon, who had gone to the edge of the slope, calls that they come. Vladimir: “It’s Godot! ... We’re saved!” (47) Estragon walks to the other side of the stage, comes back, says that he has gone again to the edge of the slope. Vladimir concludes that they are on a plateau and are now encircled. Estragon walks to the back of the stage and falls against the scenery. Vladimir leads him toward the forestage. But Estragon does not want to flee beyond the forestage. Even the tree does not offer any cover to Estragon. Estragon on the left of the edge of the stage and Vladimir

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104 Hans rainer sepp keep watch. Both become angered, insult each other, and fall back in each other’s arms. Vladimir: “How time flies when one has fun!” Estragon: “What do we do now?” (49) They make contortions, mark the “tree.” Estragon screams at the top of his voice: “God, have pity on me!” (49) Pozzo, who has become blind, and Lucky, burdened as before, appear. The leash is shorter, Lucky wears a new hat. Lucky, under the stare of Vladimir and Estragon, stays there. Pozzo strikes at him, both fall. Vladimir: “Now we’re sure to see the evening out.” (49) Pozzo calls for help, Vladimir and Estragon debate and argue. Vladimir wants to help Pozzo, but falls and calls Estragon for help. Estragon extends his hand, pulls and falls down too: “Sweet Mother Earth!” (53) Pozzo pleads again for mercy, Vladimir hits him, Pozzo crawls away and collapses. Vladimir and Estragon call him. Estragon believes that one should try with another name: “Abel! Abel!” (53) Pozzo answers. Estragon:“Perhaps the other is called Cain,” and calls, “Cain! Cain!” (53) Pozzo answers again. Estragon:“He’s all humanity.” (54) Vladimir and Estragon stand up altogether and help Pozzo, who again calls for help, to stand up; but left alone, he falls again to the ground. They make him stand up again and support him. Pozzo asks where his slave is. Estragon kicks Lucky and hurts himself, Lucky comes to consciousness, Estragon crouches down. Lucky stands up, takes up his suitcase, gives Pozzo the whip and the ropes. He sets out, Pozzo behind him. Still, as Pozzo comes to a halt and the rope is stretched, Lucky falls to the ground; Vladimir hits Pozzo und kicks Lucky. Lucky stands up, puts the rope back in Pozzo’s Hand and puts on the suitcase. Before Pozzo and Lucky leave, Vladimir wishes that Lucky sings, thinks or recites. Pozzo answers that he is dumb. Pozzo and Lucky leave the stage. Vladimir wakes up Estragon, who had fallen asleep. “I was dreaming I was happy.” (57) Estragon, busy with his shoes and painful feet, falls again asleep. Vladimir ponders what he will say tomorrow of this day. Estragon will know nothing. But even himself, Vladimir, is looked at by another who tells himself: “He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.” (58) Vladimir walks around excitedly and looks afar. The boy from yesterday appears. He says that he does not recognize Vladimir. Mr. Godot will come tomorrow. The boy runs away, the sun goes down, the moon rises. Estragon wakes up, takes off his shoes. Vladimir: “Everything’s dead but the tree.” (59) Estragon, later:“Why don’t we hang ourselves?” (60) They have no rope. Estragon’s cord, which holds his pants, breaks up as the two of them pull at it. Vladimir and Estragon fall down. They want to bring “a good bit of rope” the next day (60). Vladimir: “We’ll

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hang ourselves tomorrow.... Unless Godot comes.” (60) Vladimir takes off Lucky’s hat and puts it on again. Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go! They do not move. (60)

T

he task I set for myself in what follows is to analyze the structure which builds the coordinates of the world, so to speak, presented in Waiting for Godot. A phenomenological reading can discover this structure. The result of such an analysis can be beneficial both for literature and philosophy. On the one hand, literary works are elucidated by phenomenological means and, on the other, philosophical experiences deposited in the work can be explicitly treated as philosophical problems. In my phenomenological reading I deal with the structural connections of such experiences.

I. Vertical + horizontal = crosswise There are few things in this drama, but these few form a track to follow. They make apparent the structure in which the characters are involved. Three of these things seem particularly essential: shoes, hats, and the rope by which Lucky is led. “Shoe” and “hat” are among the most often mentioned real present things. Estragon is constantly busy putting on or taking off his shoes, because his feet hurt. Vladimir constantly occupies himself with his hat. The hat is also necessary for Lucky “to think”; Vladimir and Estragon take off their hat in order to concentrate and they exchange them, including Lucky’s hat, back and forth. As the hat refers to the head wearing it, the shoes refer to the feet they are on. Head and foot form a polarity for which Vladimir and Estragon, even with their names, are accountable. Their polarity encompasses the extremes that pertain to human existence: the earthly-natural and the spiritualsacred, earth and heaven, ground and transcendence. Estragon is caught  ‘Vladimir,’ the name of the Russian Grand Duke who is considered sacred in Orthodox Christiniaty, refers to the “higher,” “heavenly” region of the sacred. “Estragon” refers to the taragon herb orginating from located in south Russia, Latin Artemisia dracunculus, and thus to the nether region of the natural.

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in the earthly: he sits on the ground, constantly thinks of eating, easily falls asleep, dreams and forgets. Human beings are natural, not only in that they have needs, but also to the extent that their historical origin can never be brought back into a present and thus remains foreclosed. Vladimir is turned to the horizon. He moves around restless, stares in the open, unremittingly combs the far away. Also with regard to what is coming, human beings are not their own masters. Any search ends at the point where what is alledgedly looked after is in reality something yet to come. To be caught in the nature-like and natural and moving forward into what is not yet are polarities in that they include a part of what is their contrary. It is Vladimir who gives Estragon the paultry meal, as Estragon from time to time contemplates the sky. The openness, of itself relative to the ground, only exists for the possibility to set out; conversely only an entity which can imagine and thus go beyond what exists can come into relation with what exists. The polarity which is embodied in Vladimir and Estragon, the polarity between ground and transcendence, is a vertical one. Pozzo leads Lucky around with a rope. Pozzo is the master and Lucky the slave. But also for this polarity the following holds: Pozzo is not simply the master and Lucky the slave. Pozzo as a master depends on his being bound to his slave, who carries his belongings. Pozzo has essentially internalized this relation of dependence with obvious increasing intensity. In the first act the exploiter already appears spiritually depleted: he feels tricked by his slave. There is no way to find out whether his feeling is the product of his imagination or is based on facts. What is clear is that the master has mastery neither over others nor over himself, over his own feelings. Vladimir’s sympathy goes prima facie only toward Lucky, but afterward also toward Pozzo. In the second act the oppressor becomes completely oppressed when he becomes blind and remains completely dependent on his slave. The master now does not take the lead; the slave does. The master cannot keep up with the pace and falls to the ground. The relativity of this polarity means that on earth there are neither masters nor slaves, but everyone is both at the same time, because nobody is able of himself to be only master or only slave. The inability to be really a master is grounded in the twofold uncertainty of not being able to avail oneself of one’s own ground or one’s own future. If the link to the ground and transcendence delineate human existence, the relative opposition of the oppressor and the oppressed characterizes

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the real form of this fundamental structure which appears as real where human beings live factually in the world, i.e., when they exist as social beings. The mode of existence of sociality is praxis. Pozzo manifests himself as a highly practical person. He is a member of society, while Estragon and Vladimir are outlaws, who embody the “naked” structure of existence itself and who have, so to speak, inhibited sociality. Even Pozzo has a link to heaven, but a determinate one: for example, he explains dusk. He has the need to eat too, but in the socially cultivated form of a picnic. However, he is interested neither in his shoes or feet as Estragon, nor only in his hat or the breadth of the sky as Vladimir. He is a practical person, because he is concerned with this or that. He has no time (and still he has), because he does not experience time, but counts it. His existence is unstable like all praxis: Praxis has sometimes these interests and sometimes others. Hence, he forgets what no longer belongs to the direction of present interests. His business with numbers is the helpless attempt to counter what slips away with some stability. The unstable relationship between master and slave is reflected in the instability of the practical access to the world—in the occasional, in the forgetting, in being fixed on this or that and thus in the blindness not only toward everything that does not correspond to the present interest, but also and particularly toward everything else that does not have the structure of this being-fixed. Lucky appears as someone who is dependent. He is led by a leash. At the same time he is isolated, unable to communicate. In an autistic way he recites an incoherent conglomerate of texts. In his isolated dependence on Pozzo he reflects the theoretical position on the world that grows out of praxis: to make oneself independent as “theoretical praxis,” and still to remain always dependent on praxis as “theoretical praxis” (Husserl). If Vladimir and Estragon explore the vertical polarity of a possible human existence, Pozzo and Lucky are already in the horizontal polarity. The rope stretched horizontally binding them in their unstable master-slave relationship is the manner in which vertical possibilities of existence can be realized socially. Vladimir and Estragon, who as outlaws stand outside any real sociality, have only themselves; they are beaten by others or only come in loose contact with others. Obviously they had already met Pozzo and Lucky several times, but even these encounters  “Six hours”; “that was nearly sixty years ago”; “say ten o’clock in the morning.” He also praises his watch: “A genuine half-hunter, gentlemen, with deadbeat escapement!”

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build no relationship with one another. Estragon and Vladimir remain separated, lead an existence close to the margin of mere possibilities of existence, without actuality. The leash which horizontally binds Pozzo and Lucky also plays a role for them, but according to them a vertical one: as a rope from which to hang oneself in order to prepare an end to life. To realize existentially the mere possibility of existence Vladimir and Estragon talk about preparing an end to their life, but they do not manage to actually do it. They embody the possibility of existence and the structure of possibility cannot be eliminated. Since they embody such a possibility, they are by the same token concrete people who could also realize the possibility of dying. But they say: “Tomorrow.” The temporal postponement still retains the possibility to end life and the possibility to break up the very possibility to live. Estragon and Vladimir are thus not only outside the social integration, they also live an existential paradox: they exist and they constantly question the possibility of existence through the manner in which they realize their existence. They always want to “go away,” but they cannot manage to do it. They stay in the “there.” The fact that they are the “there” which can never be changed, not only represents a constant compared to the fundamental structures of human existence; they exist as the paradox that could cancel the conditions for authentic existence and still at the same time represents these very conditions. This means that they exist only as this paradox and as long as they exist as this paradox. The permanent postponement which maintains the paradox consists in waiting. If the relation to the world is always practical, then master and slave, Pozzo and Lucky are “all humanity” (as Estragon says), since the master alone—as well as the slave—can be Abel and Cain, good and evil. “All mankind is us,” claims Vladimir about himself and Estragon, and to be this means, as Vladimir continues, to wait,“waiting for Godot to come.” (51) In order to be “humanity” the horizontal link of the practical, of the moral, of good and evil does not suffice. What needs to be added is the “vertical” urge to want the cancellation of one’s own possibility of existence from the depth of the link to the earth and still to negate this will by oneself, thus only to wait. The “total humanity” as being human is thus this intermingling of praxis and naked link to existence, of the horizontal and the vertical. In Western culture this is expressed through the cross. Vladimir and Estragon twice allude to the carrier of this cross, which also carries its carrier, Jesus. But the cross formed by Pozzo/Lucky

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and Vladimir/Estragon does not manifest any more the failing of the son of God in the world. It is the cross, inherent in the being-in-the-world, which marks its outline and at the same time its being-surrendered to the world. The vertical polarity, the intermingled opposition of being confined to the ground and far-reaching transcendence, represents the essential structural axis which is inherent in all practical link to the world as a fundamental structure—like the body of Christ forming the vertical on the cross. At the same time the vertical axis only finds its full realization in the horizontal dimension of praxis—like the outstretched arms of the crucified on the cross, with his wide-open hands which are the tool at the beginning of all human praxis. The “cross” of the being-in-the-world (Vladimir: “To every man his little cross”) forms a circle in the dimensions of the temporal and spatial. Vladimir says, “at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us.” (51) “Humanity” and the structure that constitutes it are not a form in which changing contents are poured. The structure as spatio-temporal only consists in being at each time a new realization. But the structures of time and space are not only always formed anew, they only unfold in a narrow reciprocal relationship. The fact that it is not possible to go away also means that in the world human beings are always assigned to a place (“there”), which at the same time allows for the experience of a temporality (“waiting”). Human beings are assigned to a time (“the same”), which opens a spatiality (transcendence). In the same way that waiting does not only refer to temporality, but also to the spatiality which forms itself in waiting, in the same way moving-beyond does not only refer to the place which is left and to the spatiality which opens up in the difference between the place left and the movement of moving-beyond; moving-beyond also refers to the temporality constituted with this movement. This intermingling of temporality and spatiality functions in every moment. All history is spatializing and all movement is temporalizing.

II. Jagged continuity 1. Spatio-temporal As the fundamental structure-building axis, the vertical dimension delineates a spatio-temporality which lets its structure gleam through even in concrete forms like Vladimir and Estragon. Its structure is on

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the one hand the being-founded in a place and on the other its moving beyond which has always already been undertaken (being able to actually leave without doing it). This tension between remaining anchored and moving beyond constitutes the spatio-temporal field of existence. But it is constantly formed anew and in new styles which vary the fundamental schema or are superimposed on it. One of the fundamental styles consists in ending the goal of moving-beyond, to live such a moving-beyond as if it led to a goal. The ending can, even more objectively, be an objectification. The goal is tied to an end that is reachable as a goal, for example in a concrete representation of the divine—or in Godot. But in all these styles the fundamental schema remains. It shows itself not only in the mode of each style, but only has existence in the stylized concrete forms it takes and nowhere else. In these styles the spatio-temporal structures are concretized in a continuum of space and time. The continuous means a determinate rule-governed order in the interpretation of the spatio-temporal field of existence, an order of space and time which promises a certain permanence. It is what has been called, in a manner that is not satisfactory because linked to the domain of linguistic communication, “language games.” However, the constancy of this continuum is always threatened. The urge to break out causes an uncertainty with regard to the place where one is. Willing to move beyond, which gives existence its original spatiotemporal structure, also makes it the case, as a push into the u-topic, that the concrete forms of this structure always collapse, but can always be rebuilt. Being bound to the ground might well offer anchorage; it also leads to a fragility in time. The ground holds together, does not yield, is always threatening, so as to foreclose again everything that has been liberated in the undifferentiated of the unnameable. In the distanceless of what has been handed over to the ground, time intertwines itself. Human beings forget. The damage of spatial identity is met by action and the creation of a overarching view. The place is paced off. From it the open and the horizon are measured. Precisely in the moment of danger space (as space-time) is plumbed and the world of play is shown to be a “plateau.” Even the restitution of time (as space-time) must always be mobilized anew through counting and preserving memory. To take place by acting and to carry the past through language attempt to stretch anew the tension of the fragile continuum.

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2. Living bodily The intermingling of temporality and spatiality is grounded in the body. The vertical polarity itself is bodily formed from “head to toe.” The spatio-temporal stretching of transcendence is constantly a bodily taking of space (and time): the space of play is always paced off so that it can be plumbed. If the appearance of Pozzo and Lucky all too often stays in the mere crossing of the world of play, in a linear way, Vladimir’s and Estragon’s movements regularly measure them in all directions. Similarly the spatio-temporal breaking up of the ground through reminiscing talks are always bodily to the extent that all language not only presupposes a body endowed with language, but is founded in the body and has as its immediate foundation the “living physical body” (Leibkörper, Marc Richir). If all movements of actions and all speaking are attempts to preserve the threatened existential spatio-temporal continuum against total disintegration, and if these attempts are grounded in the living body, this embodiment is first of all threatened by the possible rupture of the continuum. Pain is the great indicator of such an hiatus, always reappearing, in the continuum. Pain occurs at the beginning of all existential spatio-temporal tension at birth and the unfolding of the ground: Estragon’s feet constantly hurt. The fact that the push forward in the u-topic establishes continuities, but at the same time causes them to founder, has its basis in the fact that the spatio-temporal stretching of human existence is grounded in the body—being able is freedom in an original sense and conceals in itself the moment of risk, the danger of disintegration. Vladimir shouts: “The air is full of our cries.” (58) Transcendence is medium and addressee of a bodily wound. This means that the danger arises out of the same domain for which it is a danger: for what is not fixed, for the fundamental possibility that individual existences can make decisions in this or that way. Scream is the expression of this split which in this way is integrated in a continuity. Scream, like laughter, represents a limit point of linguistic expression (where language itself comes to an end) and refers to the embodi The appearance of Pozzo and Lucky is announced by a twofold scream: as a reaction to Lucky’s talk the others burst into shout; in the second act Vladimir screams because he believes that Estragon has tried to abandon him. And Estragon screams from pain because Lucky has kicked him. Pozzo emits screams of pain when Vladimir and Estragon attack him.

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ment of language. The result of such ruptures, which establish pain, is separation, isolation, but also violent clash. Vladimir and Estragon measure out their world also through the fact that they (want to) leave each other and reunify again. In the social domain individual separation, individual will, leads to conflict of interests and violence. Where the vertical dimension meets the horizontal dimension, in the middle point of the cross we have a scuffle among all. Paradoxically it is only pain and thus the unceasing rupture of continuity causing it which promises continuity: “The tears of the world are a constant quantity,” Pozzo says in the first act. But this continuity only gives parallels and superimpositions of continuities, for “for each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. (22)

3. Transfinite The threat against continuity, the threatening disintegration of the world is structurally possible from two sides. The violent confrontation gathers a world in which several particular worlds encounter each other. There in the center, at the crosspoint of the violent encounter all spatio-temporality, all freedom as possibility to move and to speak vanishes. Praxis itself is a non-place of the constant reciprocal spaceand time-consumption. Hence Pozzo learned to count with time and he has eventually become blind. With his blindness he lost his freedom of movement and his spatio-temporality for action. If entering praxis (and theoretical praxis) has a tendency toward apathy and violence from apathy, the outsider runs the risk of becoming mad: to fall away from the world in the world. This threatens the fundamental coordinates of a spatio-temporal continuity. Estragon who is the properly uprooted, although not in a fixed way, walks around the stage and hits the absolute limits of his world against the scenery and the light and is almost beyond himself. Violence out of apathy and collapse in madness mark two poles of how the limits of the world of meaning, of the fragile spatio-temporal continuuum, can be touched. Both forms of such a limit experience lie on the withdrawal of meaning. In both cases the screen of meaningful relations or of a complete meaningful world has withdrawn. And it is such a screen that offers possibilities. There is also an experience of the limits of the relations to the world or of the connection of meaning on the basis of what is opposite: on the basis of meaning. The simplest form to reach the limit of a determinate

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totality of meaning is reflection. It repeats a connection of meaning on the path of meaning, it reproduces it in the totality of the proper sense of reflection and thus takes the measure of its breadth. Vladimir advises Estragon that they should play with Pozzo and Lucky. In the real encounter with them Vladimir and Estragon are participants until the conflictual confrontation. In the playful repetition of this encounter and in its playful duplicity, the egos of Vladimir and Estragon break down: Vladimir becomes Vladimir/Lucky and Estragon becomes Estragon/Pozzo. Precisely then and only then, when Vladimir and Estragon play the roles of Pozzo and Lucky (and not in the cases in which they encounter each other and are involved in a real situation) can they “look” at each other. This reflective reflecting game is an increase in freedom. Vladimir and Estragon are not only free to be in the game different from what they are, with regard to the practical Pozzo they are already distinguished in that they are free from his involvement in the praxis (and free from the practical taking at one’s service in the case of Lucky) and can take the full measure of existence bound to the earth until the experience of the breadth of the heaven. They become free now in that they can even choose to represent bound forms of existence for the duration of a game. A play can be repeated:“I play that I play that I play...” Just a reflection: “I reflect that I reflect that I reflect, etc.” In such a movement there is no end point. As in a whirlpool the meaningful experience of the limits of a connection of meanings is swept away in the meaninglessness of an infinite regress. Vladimir, the transcending, encounters such a meaninglessness as the extreme form of meaning twice: first, in the “transfinite” song, “The dog in the kitchen,”  which he recites at the beginning of the second act and, second, when he sees Estragon asleep and notes: “At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying. He is sleeping, 

“A dog came in the kitchen And stole a crust of bread. The cook up with a ladle And beat him till he was dead. Then all the dogs came running And dug the dog a tomb And wrote upon the tombstone For the eyes of dogs to come: A dog came in the kitchen [...].” (37-38)

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he knows nothing, let him sleep on.” The movement of the transfinite duplicity of meaning conceals in itself a pre-decision: people decide by and large not to tolerate a limit, but to transgress any delimitation with the help of the repeated relationship to meaning. What is not considered is whether this mode of transcendence through meaning with its implicit presupposition does not rather disclose a limit which not only is not transgressed, but does not even become visible. The transfinite relation of such a mode, of the “and so on and so forth,” is the expression of the finitude as termination of one’s life.

4. Finally The example of “The dog in the kitchen” points to the finitude of the link to the transfinite to the extent that the carrier of the transfinite is a tombstone. But this does not only mean that the carrier of the sense “transfiniteness” are human beings and specifically these mortals. Human beings are finite not only because they can imagine the infinite advance forward into the horizon of sense. They are finite precisely with regard to the transfinite, the proper meaning of which does not consist in the fact that situations continuously are left behind and thus provoke an infinite circle of meaning, but rather in the fact that to the contrary only one is exceeded: human existence, which limits itself with the apparent absence of all limits in the madness of the continuous. Only with this transfinite can existence grasp itself in its finitude in the fact that a limit is drawn for it and still grasps with and so to speak on the limit of its being-finite what transcdends this limit in its beyond itself. This me-ontic experience of the impression left by the beyond-itself as the not of the there in the there is the proper movement of transcendence. The tension that is immanent to such a movement cannot be cancelled at the ontic-existential or at the ontological level. The not of the there is in no way a not yet and no “anticipation” can ever recuperate it. The unbridgeable chasm between the there and the not-there in the there which holds the transcending in its movement and which thus creates an essential condition for existence is also the moment which  The other in question here is par excellence the spectator of the play. The spectator of a play imagines that he knows more than the person acting in the play. But he forgets that he is also involved in a more encompassing play.  The French original says: “croix [!] en bois blanc”.

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also represents the first and last addressee for the attempt toward the self-elimination of existence. This chasm is a paradox: one wants to eliminate it but we are bound to it as a necessary condition for all action, even suicide. Apart from the alternative to confirm this chasm either in the dying out of existence or in ignoring it when people save themselves in busying themselves with things, there is only one way left to remain in the chasm in a paradoxical manner. If the permanent postponement in which this paradox is maintained consists in waiting, then the performance of the act of waiting is the only existential form of corresponding to the presence of the transfinite, to endure the chasm of the not-there in the there. This enduring disrupts life, which in this manner hopes for the redemption of the principle of hope, and this hope can never find fulfilment. In this disruption, a spatio-temporal characteristic is constituted: of presenting the void. Anything particular, this and that, which lies in the practical interest is immersed for the ultimate interest in the chasm of the transfinite. The void is the spatio-temporal realm of a mere waiting which has no chance of redemption in this realm and the spatio-temporal realms associated with it. The void stands “above” this or that which can be hoped for and remains “below” what can never appear for human existence: below the closing of the chasm between what absolutely exceeds the there of existence. This void is felt in boredom which cannot be fought by any activity. Such a void can be fulfilled with this or that without really disappearing. This void is for Vladimir and Estragon the fundamental mood of their existence. Any fulfilment is occasional and as a now already gone. For Lucky and Pozzo the fundamental mood of being fulfilled dominates. Lucky is in the truest sense filled with the data of his theoretical praxis and Pozzo presents himself as the “owner,” manager of the fullness, of things, of numbers. But this fullness opens no spatio-temporal realm for movement and creates no freedom, to the contrary: It causes its owner to tumble, to fall to the ground. The suitcase Lucky carries (and which, as almost everything, belongs to Pozzo) is also filled: with sand. Sand, which is fullness, has no structure; it is thrown in the eyes and blinds; it runs through the fingers as through an hour-glass, which counts time only in the moment, but cannot stop it and eventually disavows any alledged gained true fullness. There is thus only one alternative for human existence: either giving up the attainment of fullness, i.e., the ideal of being-filled as a lasting state of happiness in which the difference

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between there and not-there is closed, and to transpose oneself in the void, or to immerse oneself in a finite fullness, in a fullness which can only be countability or mere materiality. However this is not really an alternative. Since both modes of existence would lead life so quickly to its end, there are not always breaking points which would always and again postpone an absolute immersion in the fullness—through the revolution of the master-slave relationship, through situations of conflict with others—as these breaking points prevent an oblivion of oneself in the unarticualted void. What pertains to the latter, the fullness is not only broken up through implanted fullness of time, through “pastime.” Waiting also contains happy dreams or even short real moments of content at hand,10 so much that existence is always motivated toward a waiting. The strongest motivation results from hope that the gap between there and not-there could be closed. This hope is nurtured by a revelation which goes beyond the proper spatio-temporality, the actual relation to the world irrupting in it from the outside. The young man—a Hermes, the messenger of the gods as “sent” by the transfinite—always brings over the news that Mr. Godot will come not today, but tomorrow. This revelation is at each time constraining, since the messenger himself does not stand in any continuity to previous revelations. He himself has no recollection of a previous appearing and thus establishes no connection with his previous epiphanies or with the situation of those to whom the message is brought. For the spatio-temporal continua (already broken up) in which the revelation penetrates on the basis of the absence of connection between the revelation and the continua, revelation becomes the greatest stabilizer of the attitude of the void, of “waiting.” For revelation articulates the void, makes in it always breaking moments, limits which motivate the waiting, to the extent that they make waiting realistic. Whereas oblivion within a continuum constantly threatens the continuum and finds in waiting a salvation (Vladimir must always encourage Estragon to wait),  “True” fullness only owns the un-conscious. Vladimir says:“Everything’s dead but the tree.” Nature knows, differently from humans with their “dead voices.” Nature has no temporal unfolding, no conscious preservation of the past.  Estragon: “I was dreaming I was happy.” 10 Estragon: “We are happy.... What do we do now, now that we’re happy?” Vladimir: “... we were happy ... [...] what do we do now we’re happy ... go on … waiting ...”

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the message reappearing as always new reinforces from the outside the power of waiting, which is always threatened from the inside in its establishment of continuity. Revelation and faith in revelation exercise the central function that life does not despair of permanently enduring the difference between there and not-there. The experience of the limit breaks up the current spatio-temporal order, while also establishing a new order—the night falls quickly, time goes by faster. Waiting receives a new impulse. This impulse always carries something that has come to an end, an image, a concrete goal (and establishes anew a style of waiting): that Godot will certainly come tomorrow, and thus the certainty that life can be fulfilled. If the belief in this image is also the engine for the waiting itself, there is a final irony of existence in that precisely the belief in fulfilment is what guarantees the acceptance that fulfilment is impossible; or that the last confirmation of the finitude of existence produces the belief that the intent to actually lead to a goal (Godot) at the same time manifests and supports the infiniteness of existence (waiting). The fact that the transfinite does not come to an end in the transfinite circle of situations, but in the belief in its recuperation is not in contradiction with its remaining open. This coming to an end rather maintains open the chasm of the not-there in the there, since this belief remains a belief and can never find fulfilment. Accordingly this “coming to an end” is “providing an end”: leading existence back to the limit of its being-finite, as well as trans-finite, in making arrive in a finite way what exceeds the finite. The “figurative sense” of this pure experience of the impossibility of fulfilment on earth is the eikon as the image of the absolute remaining transparent and not eidolon, which captures the gaze and corresponds to the current coming to an end.11 Estragon and Vladimir embody a relation to the world the carriers of which do not fall from the world, but plumb the link of the world to its extreme. Phenomenologically speaking, this extreme includes in itself an Epoché, which dispenses not only of the style of being involved in practical and practical-theoretical attitudes, but maintains open the tension to the excess of the transfinite. Translation edited by Kyle McNeel 11 See Jean-Luc Marion, “Fragments sur l’idole et L’icone”, in: Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 84, 1979, 433-445.

5 Engaging Across Traditions:

Royce & Gadamer on Interpretation

David Vessey

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he canons of diverse traditions may share texts, figures, and questions, but that doesn’t necessarily make communication across traditions any easier. The figures and texts, while shared, are often not shared in the same way. To know Karl Marx’s Capital belongs to a thinker’s tradition is not yet to know if that thinker is an economist or a social theorist. But to know the thinker works in the tradition of Marx and Theodor Adorno is to know the thinker most likely does not work in the tradition of Marx and Adam Smith, or Marx and Mao Tse-tung, for that matter. The Marx embraced by the economist is often not the same Marx embraced by the social theorist or the political revolutionary—for one the theory of capital is the central guiding principle of Marx’s other views, for another it’s the historical materialism, and for a third the theory of alienation. In this example, all lay claim to the “real” Marx; as a result the debates between them rarely constitute a genuine engagement but instead devolve into turf battles. Their first priority is claiming the figure or text as their own, not coming together to appreciate the complexity of the figure’s views. In the case of shared questions the situation is not as bad. A tradition’s strength and staying power lies in its ability to pose relevant questions, to resolve those questions in compelling ways, and to show why other questions are not worth asking. When traditions intersect on a question the occasion arises for each tradition to take up the task of defending its answer. Engagement across traditions should follow. Of course, it may be that what looks like the same question being asked by two different traditions is actually two separate questions that appear united only when expressed in the most generic terms. Confucius and John Dewey both ask the question, “What is the relation between an individual and society?” but the simplicity of the formulation hides enormous differ-

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ences. Also, it is not always clear whether the disagreements belong to the question or to the answer. When Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant present divergent answers to the question, “What is one’s duty to the state?” are they asking different questions—they share neither the same notion of duty nor the same of state—or is it that they are offering complicated answers to the same question, answers that require specifying what we mean by “duty” and “state”? To settle such questions is to settle the debate itself, and that cannot be done without genuine engagement across traditions. All this is to point out that engagement across traditions on shared questions is quite different from engagement across traditions on shared texts and shared authors. When others disagree with us we need to see if they are asking the same question, and, if so, why they answer the question differently than we do. If they are asking a different question, we need to know how we would answer that question as well as why that question isn’t ours. Hans-Georg Gadamer, the main figure in the hermeneutic tradition, is right to say that to engage others requires seeing how they could be right, which is to say that to engage others requires seeing how they could be providing a plausible answer to a legitimate question. In Truth and Method and elsewhere Gadamer has articulated the canonical history, figures, and texts of hermeneutics. Needless to say American pragmatism is not included in the canonical history, and appropriately so. However, Josiah Royce—a canonical figure in the pragmatist tradition—in the second part of his 1913 book The Problem of Christianity takes up in detail the question, “What is interpretation?” and in doing so crosses paths with one of the central questions in the hermeneutic tradition. My task here will be to look carefully at how Royce formulates and answers the question in order to see what hermeneutics can learn from Royce. The hermeneutic tradition as articulated by Gadamer is my starting point and ending point, so the answer will not be to abandon hermeneutics for pragmatism, nor will it be that the answers Royce provides are so embedded in his tradition that engagement is impossible. As hermeneuts, we are committed to the denial of

 His account has been reproduced in a number of histories of hermeneutics: Palmer 1969, Grondin 1994, and Ferraris 1996 are three key examples.

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radical incommensurability and to the hope of a fusion of horizons. We are also committed to revising our views in dialogue with others. First, a few words as to why Royce takes up the question of the nature of interpretation in such an unusual place as a discussion of the nature of Christianity. Royce lays out what he saw as the three essential features of Christianity—the importance of belonging to a spiritual community, the inescapable moral burden of every individual, and the need for atonement; the question then was how these three features manifested themselves in actual Christian communities and this required reflection on the general organization of communities. Royce concludes that a community gets its identity from the shared interpretations of the members of the community. A community as we have seen, depends for its very constitution upon the way each of its members interprets himself and his life. For the rest, nobody’s self is either a mere datum or an abstract conception. A self is a life whose unity and connectedness depend upon some sort of interpretation of plans, of memories, of hopes, and of deeds. …Were there, then, no interpretations in the world there would be neither selves nor communities (Royce 1968, 274).

Two things will immediately endear themselves to hermeneutics. First, we interpret things when we need to understand them. All understanding is interpretive. Moreover, in some cases (and I’ll leave it open whether this is true in all cases) it’s the interpretation that acts to bring about the object of the interpretation. Interpretation doesn’t just reveal something already waiting, but constitutes it. In Royce’s case, interpretation is the means by which the self is constituted as a unified self. It connects not just to how we understand ourselves, but also to what we are as selves. Second, interpretation has social implications. In the case of the self, the same activity that individuates us socializes us. As we interpret we locate ourselves within various communities of interpreters who share our interpretation. This sociality may not exhaust the social dimensions of interpretation, but it serves our purpose here of highlighting two themes in Royce amenable to hermeneutics. Royce goes on to say  Properly understood, that is. A fusion of horizons is not the same as agreement, rather it is an increased understanding of the preconceptions that lead one to accept one view over another and an understanding of how those preconceptions need to be revised to integrate together the legitimate insights from both views.

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that “to inquire what the process of interpretation is, takes us at once to the very heart of philosophy [and] throws light both on the oldest and latest issues of metaphysical thought” (Royce 1968, 274); this is hermeneutic gospel. So even though he belongs to a different tradition, those of us in hermeneutics can see Royce as “one of us.” But perhaps that is because we have yet to look at his views in any depth of detail. It’s easy to generate agreement by leaving out the details. Royce contrasts the process of interpreting with the processes of conceptualizing and perceiving. Generally the latter two are thought to be sufficient for an account for the mental life of a person. We get universals from our conceptions and particulars from our perceptions, and we may even develop sophisticated theories about how they are related through successful action (i.e., that the content of the concept is just that which would appear to perception were the concept given power to guide action). The classic debate of empiricism versus rationalism swings on which of the two ought to be understood as taking precedence in the production of knowledge. But Royce thinks interpretation constitutes a third, entirely distinct cognitive process best exemplified through our awareness of other minds. We are aware of other minds, but how? It couldn’t be that we have a conception of the other mind, for conceptions only provide universals and we are aware of particular other minds. Yet we never have sense perceptions of other minds either. We can speculate about the contents of another’s mind, but we lack the perceptions to trigger or confirm our speculations; without the perceptions, the conceptions have no place to lead, no cash value, and must remain empty, speculative, and incapable of generating awareness. There must be another kind of awareness. Royce takes up the metaphor of perceptions being the cash value of conceptions (thought of as credit) and points out that converting currency as we cross a border is always a different kind of transaction than simply providing cash for credit. There is an interpretation—an exchange rate—and actions based on this interpretation. He writes, Each of us, in every new effort to communicate with our fellow-men, stands, like the traveler crossing the boundary of a new country, in the presence of a largely strange world of perceptions and conceptions. Our neighbor’s perceptions, in their immediate presence, we never quite certainly share. Our neighbors conceptions … are so largely communicable that they can often be regarded as identical, in certain aspects of their meaning, with our own. But the active syntheses,

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the practical processes of seeking and of construction, the volitions, the promises, whereby we pass from our own concepts to our own percepts, are often in a high degree individual…. Therefore, in our efforts to view the world as other men view it, our undertaking is very generally analogous to the traveler’s financial transactions when he crosses the boundary. We try to solve the problem of learning how to exchange the values of our own lives into the terms which can hope to pass current in the new or foreign spiritual realms whereto, when we take counsel together, we are constantly attempting to pass (Royce 1968, 283–84).

Perceptions are individual and similar, but not the same due to differences in perspective. Conceptions are universal, and communicable for that reason, but fail to tell us about the other’s particularity. The key to differences across traditions (across boundaries) has to do with the different ways that universal conceptions get “cashed out” by particular perceptions. How conceptions are connected to perceptions has to do with the actions and instincts of the individual and these vary from individual to individual (and from tradition to tradition). So when it comes to understanding one another in communication, we are not simply looking for confirming connections between perceptions and concepts. We are looking for new ways of associating concepts and percepts; we are coming to understand differently. This process is the same one that occurs when we try to understand ourselves across periods of time (though in such a case the boundary is not cultural but temporal). Understanding ourselves and others, then, is never simply a matter of conceptions or perceptions alone, rather we need a third distinct cognitive process to explain how this is possible—interpretation. At this point Royce introduces what might seem like a truism, but it will lead us to see what hermeneutics can learn from Royce. He argues that interpretation always relates three things: the interpreter, what is being interpreted, and that for whom the interpretation is taking place. Interpretations are always by someone of something for someone. For example Royce (by someone) interprets the “problems of Christianity” (of something) for a 1913 philosophical audience (to someone). This threefold structure applies to self-understanding too: we interpret our As in hermeneutics, for Royce self-understanding is not a special kind of understanding but operates in just the same way by which we come to understand others. Royce quotes Charles Sanders Peirce: “there is no royal road to self-knowledge” (Royce 1968, 285).

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selves for ourselves; “through the present self the past is so interpreted that its counsel is conveyed to the future self ” (Royce 1968, 288). But this is a special case of the more general fact that interpretation always happens with an audience in mind. According to Royce, the person for whom the interpretation exists is traditionally neglected from theories of interpretation. Royce then connects the triadic structure of interpretation to the argument that interpretation is a unique kind of knowledge, typified by knowledge of other minds. Psychologically speaking, the mental process which thus involves three members differs from the perception and the conception in three respects. First, interpretation is a conversation, and not a lonely enterprise. There is someone, in the realm of psychological happenings, who addresses someone. The one who addresses interprets some object to the one addressed. In the second place, the interpreted object is itself something which has the nature of a mental expression. Peirce uses the term “sign” to name this mental object which is interpreted. Thirdly, since the interpretation is a mental act, and is an act which is expressed, the interpretation itself is, in its turn, a sign. This new sign calls for further interpretation. For the interpretation is addressed to somebody. And so,—at least in the ideal,—the social process involved is endless (Royce 1968, 289–90).

Interpretation differs from perception and conception in virtue of always invoking an audience for the interpretation. In addition, perception and conception are solely directed at objects—perception at perceptual objects, conception at conceptual objects—and thus have a natural terminus in the object of perception or conception. Interpretation has no such terminus. Neither perception nor conception introduces the cycle of sign relations, as interpretation does. Gadamer too holds that all interpretation is modeled on conversation, and that interpretation can itself become an object of interpretation. He will disagree, however, that everything interpreted “has the nature of mental expression,” but it would take us too far afield to compare Royce’s idealism with phenomenology’s attempt to move beyond the debates between idealists and realists. Gadamer will also disagree, as we will see, with the view that perceptions and conceptions exclude interpretations. Let’s look more closely why Royce thinks interpretation is an infinite process while the other two are finite. Royce points out that when we are interpreting something for someone, in order for that person to

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understand our interpretation he or she must also engage in an interpretation. Since interpretation is the activity of being aware of other minds, a conversation requires interpretations of interpretations. One person authors an interpretation for another, interpreted as the recipient of the interpretation. That recipient interprets the author as the source of an interpretation and then interprets the interpretation presented by the author. It is not just that the conversation is a kind of interpretation, nor is it just that the conversation is an exchange of interpretations. Both of these are true. In addition, however, the conversation is a series of interpretations ending only in parting. In interpreting I interpret for someone, who then interprets my interpretation, again for someone (perhaps me), which then requires another interpretation and so on; “discoveries [of interpretation] are constantly renewed by the inexhaustible resources of our social relations, while its ideals essentially demand, at every point, an infinite series of mutual interpretations in order to express what even the very least conversational effort, the least attempt to find our way in life that we would interpret, involves” (Royce 1968, 290). All interpretations are like the number line: infinitely dense and infinitely extended.  We should put out an example here on Royce’s behalf or we may get led along by mathematical metaphors and lose track of what exactly is being argued for. Consider a road sign, such as a sign for deer crossing. The sign itself is a sign, put up by an interpreter who both recognizes the meaning of deer tracks and knows the road sign vocabulary so as to be able to convey that meaning to travelers. The traveler then sees the sign as an interpretation, and interprets the interpretation by grasping the interpreter’s interpretation. The traveler understands what the sign-poster had in mind when placing the sign. In analogous fashion, we use language to interpret, creating an interpretation that is then shared with others. Others interpret our interpretation and in doing so grasp, though language, the interpretation we had in mind prior to our presentation in language. This mutual grasping of each other’s minds is what Royce has in mind when he distinguishes the object of interpretation from the object of conception and perception. He writes, “metaphysically considered, the world of interpretation is the world in which, if indeed we are able to interpret at all, we learn to acknowledge the being of the inner life of our fellow-man” (Royce 1968, 294). Since interpretation is connected to intersubjective relations, it is always a  Here the influence of Peirce on Royce shows itself again.

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constituent of community—recall our very first point that Royce sees questions of the nature of interpretation central to understanding the nature of a Christian community.  Although I’ve made comments along the way about how Royce’s views compare with Gadamer’s, we need to make a more careful comparison to appreciate how Gadamer’s views should be modified in light of Royce’s views. Fortunately, our work may already have been done for us. In a recent article Kenneth Stikkers argues that “Royce calls into question at least three central features of Gadamer’s hermeneutics” (Stikkers 2001, 16). Stikkers argues that there are severe limitations in Gadamer’s account of interpretation and that putting Royce and Gadamer in dialogue brings these limitations to light. Stikkers’s central concern is that Gadamer takes too strongly the paradigm of interpreting a text as the model for all interpretation. As a result, Gadamer takes the preinterpretive unity of the tradition and of the self for granted and misses how interpretation is intersubjectively constitutive of both of these. Gadamer prioritizes reading over community building. Royce, on the contrary, views interpretation as essentially tied to, indeed conceptually subordinate to, community formation. In his summation Stikkers writes, I have suggested, first, that traditions and communities are taken for granted by Gadamer, as part of the backdrop, the fore-structure, of interpretive understanding, while for Royce, they are constituted though interpretation. Second, while“self ” appears within Gadamer’s hermeneutics as already given and present in a more or less unified way,“self,” too, in Royce is co-constituted in relationship to texts and a community of others. And third, while texts are central to Gadamerian hermeneutics, they are instrumental and subordinate to the constitution of communities and selves in Royce (Stikkers 2001, 18).

Stikkers gets Gadamer wrong on all counts, but the way he gets him wrong is insightful for what it means to read across traditions and what hermeneutics can learn from Royce.  Royce also discusses the role of a third in adjudicating interpretations. For reasons of space I have not included that discussion here, but in a longer version I explore how Royce’s argument has changed from his early essay “The Possibility of Error” and how Gadamer’s account of interpretation needs to be clarified to both appreciate Royce’s insight and avoid Royce’s absolute idealism.

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Stikkers’s first objection is that Gadamer takes traditions for granted, while Royce sees them as “constituted through interpretation.” What Stikkers means by saying they are taken for granted is that they are taken as given, and indeed this is true, traditions are taken as given by Gadamer. In fact, the case could be made that all Gadamer ever means by tradition are those things that are always taken as given—those implicit and explicit beliefs and practices that provide the background conditions for the intelligibility of a text or an action. We can with fairly loose and broad strokes distinguish traditions by their differences of interpretive priority, but, in fact, Gadamer has nothing to say about the necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a tradition or about the identity conditions of a tradition. It’s a placeholder in his theory for those things operating behind the scenes. Royce would not want to deny that there are beliefs and practices operating behind the scenes that make interpretation possible, so the real issue becomes Stikkers’s second point: that for Royce a tradition is “constituted through interpretation.” The same, however, holds for Gadamer as well. Traditions only exist to the extent they are maintained, and they are only maintained to the extent they remain operative in interpretations. So interpretations are necessary conditions for the existence of traditions, and the way that the interpretations unfold give the explicit character to the tradition. To consciously come to understand a tradition always requires interpreting the way the tradition is active in interpretation and actions. This interpretation itself functions to affect the role of the tradition in the interpretation and, as a result, constitutes the tradition. Take as an example the intellectual tradition of liberalism. Those operating under the effects of that tradition are likely to respond positively to some texts and negatively to others. For example, they may find John Rawls’s political liberalism as a viable suggestion for how one might justly establish the basic political structure of a well-ordered society. They may not agree with it in its entirety, but they recognize it as sharing sympathies and concerns they have as liberals. However, say in the context of the ongoing debate about what constitutes liberalism—about how to understand the tradition of liberalism, its commitments, and its proper trajectory—they come to the conclusion that at the core of liberalism is the acceptance of a conception of the subject as a bearer of universal rights. This is explicitly marginalized in Rawls’s account of justice as fairness, so they may come to have new-found suspicions about Rawls and about his position in, much less his contributions to,

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liberalism. In fact, such a decision about the nature of the tradition of liberalism may provoke a hostile reaction against Rawls as a dangerous pretender to the title of “liberal.” We witness this in the strong pragmatist reactions against Richard Rorty out of concern that the tradition is being usurped or corrupted. So the tradition itself exists to the extent it persists in interpretive practice and takes on an explicit character only through interpretation. On this point, contrary to Stikkers’s claim, Gadamer and Royce seem to be on par. We could have come to this conclusion through other means: for Gadamer, the only way anything becomes present to consciousness is as interpreted. This is the shift that occurs from descriptive phenomenology to hermeneutic phenomenology. So to the extent a tradition is thematized, it is thematized through interpretation, though we still need to distinguish the tradition as thematized from the tradition operating to shape our interpretive thematizations, including that one. To the extent a tradition is consciously present, it is interpreted. Given the general principle of interpretive awareness, we should expect Stikkers is mistaken on his second objection too: that “the ‘self ’ appears within Gadamer’s hermeneutics as already given and present in a more or less unified way.” It does not take long to find examples where Gadamer says things contrary to Stikkers’s interpretation. For example, “the essence of the realization of life is still being at one with another, whether the otherness of things or other people. This is true of seeing and perceiving, thinking and knowing. In this self-realization of life, moreover, one’s own self is discerned and felt along with the other thing. … Via another, a person becomes one with himself ” (Gadamer 1999, 138). Gadamer also accepts Hegel’s account of the origin of self-consciousness as laid out in the master/slave section of the Phenomenology of Spirit: we only become self-conscious through the recognition of another. This should shed new light on the passage in Truth and Method on which Stikkers bases his argument: “History does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through a process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live” (Gadamer 1991, 276). Stikkers objects to the self-evidence claim, but that is because he takes this to be equivalent to being consciously self-aware with certainty. In fact, for Gadamer, following Heidegger, understanding as a mode of being is broader than understanding as a conscious state. So the understanding that manifests itself through our

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relations to our family, society, and state are likely to be understandings embodied in habits and practices. We are first and foremost our habits, so our identity is mediated through our traditions; as our traditions are reflected in our family, society, and state, they are the means by which we come to understand ourselves. The self-evidence of ourselves in our social relations stems not from certainty, but from being constituted by those relations. Stikkers provides Royce’s view that the “‘self ’, too, in Royce is co-constituted in relationship to texts and a community of others” as a contrast to Gadamer, but given Gadamer’s emphasis on our embeddedness in tradition (a term Stikkers takes to be equivalent to community, but in important ways they are not equivalent), the self is not only co-constituted by its relation to tradition, it is almost fully constituted by its relation to tradition. As he says, and as Stikkers repeats, “history does not belong to us; we belong to it.” Stikkers’s final argument is that“while texts are central to Gadamerian hermeneutics, they are instrumental and subordinate to the constitution of communities and selves in Royce.” It’s not entirely clear in what Stikkers means by subordination. His evidence for Royce’s view comes from The Problem of Christianity—“inquiry concerning the nature and reality of the community is still our leading topic. To this topic, whatever we shall have to say about interpretation is everywhere subordinate” (Stikkers 2001, 16)—though that can’t be the only support for his view. The fact that Royce, in a book about community, investigates interpretation as a means to better understand community is not evidence of an overall subordination of interpretation to community. Royce’s statement, also quoted by Stikkers, that “were there, then, no interpretations in the world there would be neither selves nor communities” (Royce 1968, 274) seems to suggest an inverse priority, though I think we all expect the proper relation to go both ways: no interpretations without selves and communities; no selves nor communities without interpretations. Still, we have two different ideas of subordination at work here. In one case we subsume our investigations of interpretation to our investigations of community. The relation is methodological given the goals of the project. In the other case, there is an ontological relation between interpretations and communities (and selves): interpretations depend on communities for their existence. There are other possibilities, all signaled by Stikkers. He says that “for Gadamer interpretation is foremost a matter of getting at, or laying out, the meaning of a text. … For Royce, by contrast, interpretation is first and foremost the constitution

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of community, and hence community’s traditions, for which texts being interpreted are instrumental” (Stikkers 2001, 16). The question of super and sub-ordination seems to be what is the paradigm instance from which we are going to best understand interpretation. For Gadamer, it’s the interpretation of a text; for Royce it’s the interpretation of communal signs. If this is the kind of subordination Stikkers is referring to in his objection, I agree with his interpretation of Gadamer, but how it constitutes an object is no longer so clear. At least in Truth and Method, Gadamer is concerned with rehabilitating the claim of truth in the humanities, so texts, and artworks, are the natural objects of inquiry since they are the focus of the humanities. But Gadamer goes on to extend the category of text to anything that can be interpreted, so it includes signs and actions, for example. It’s not clear that there is a significant difference here. Stikkers also writes, “for Royce, what one desires from interpretation is not to be alone, communion with others …‘Love’ is thus the central motive for interpretation in Royce’s hermeneutics” (Stikkers 2001, 16). For Gadamer, in contrast, the point of an interpretation is achieving understanding. It’s hard to see how this is a criticism of Gadamer as opposed to a concern about Royce’s goal of interpretive accuracy. It might be taken as a matter of personality, but perhaps more accurately it should be taken as a matter of their divergent interpretations of human nature. Royce thinks we are by nature seekers of community, and this is a, if not the, fundamental motivating feature of action. Gadamer believes we are interpreting beings—he embraces Aristotle’s characterization of humans as zoon echon logon, as long as logos is interpreted as “linguistically disclosive”—and this is the fundamental motive for action. Stikkers’s argument is that it follows from this difference that Royce sees textual interpretation as always being a kind of relation between two people. We interpret texts with others, or by ourselves because of our relations to others, as an explicit expression of that relation. (Recall that the other person for whom the text is interpreted can be future manifestations of our selves). We’ve seen something like this in Royce’s  Stikkers claims that a discussion of love is “conspicuously absent from Gadamer’s [hermeneutics],” but he would be well directed to Gadamer’s writings on Plato (from his dissertation, Das Wesen der Lust nach den Platonischen Dialogen, to “Amicus Plato Magis Amica Veritas” and “‘Logos’ and ‘Ergon’ in Plato’s Lysis”) and his late writings on friendship, such as “Friendship and Solidarity” and “Friendship and Self-Knowledge.”

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suggestion that interpretation picks out a distinct form of cognition that is always at work in understanding other minds. Stikkers invokes the claim that interpretation always involves a three-fold relation: the interpreter, the interpreted, and that being for whom the interpretation is presented. He claims this is different from Gadamer in that Gadamer focuses primarily on “receptively listening to the ‘voice of the other’ as manifested in and through the text” (Stikkers 2001, 17). Royce focuses on the recipient of the interpretation. This difference we will have to explore in detail for it is here that the relationship between Royce’s hermeneutics and Gadamer’s becomes most nuanced and we have the most to gain from close comparison. Let me first present briefly why Stikkers is mistaken in his Gadamer interpretation here as well. Stikkers misses three crucial features of Gadamer’s account of interpretation. First, for Gadamer all interpretations involve three parties: the two interlocutors, and the subject matter of the interpretation. This is not quite the same as Royce’s trinity, and I will unpack the differences below, but nonetheless interpretation for Gadamer is never simply a relation between a receptive reader and a text. Second, for Gadamer reading is not a passive activity of receiving the meaning of the text. We understand when we are able to interpret the text, which means to restate the meaning of the text, in effect to translate the text. We learn from being forced to become articulate anew in the presence of the interlocutor, not by simply listening to difference. Gadamer makes this point most clearly in his discussion in Truth and Method where he compares the interpretation of a text with the experience of Thou (Gadamer 1991, 358–62). He points out there that we only properly encounter texts when we take seriously what they reveal to us and that requires putting the views expressed there in ways that allow them to engage us. This is not a passive listening, but an often difficult reconstruction. Third, the alterity of the voice of the other is the alterity of the view of our interlocutor about the subject matter. Just because it is someone else making a claim doesn’t mean the claim embodies some form of alterity. It is the relation to the subject matter that establishes alterity, not the mere presence of another person. So listening to the alterity of the other is, for Gadamer, actively trying to understand what the other person has to teach us about the subject matter, no more and no less. It is a social act seeking to understand a shared meaning.

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Like Royce, then, Gadamer sees all interpretation as including three elements, the two interpreters and the object (or subject matter) of the interpretation. A is always engaging B about X. This is why all interpretation, whether of a text of another person’s views, is a dialogue. Whether we are reading Ralph Waldo Emerson on how to best live one’s life, or talking to a friend about how to best live one’s life, in either case there is an exchange of views about a subject matter in such a way that new insights arise. We are guided in our understanding of the other person by our preliminary understanding of the subject matter—the principle of charity requires us to see how the other person is providing an answer to a legitimate question about the subject matter—and we revise our understanding of the subject matter through engaging the other’s opinion. How this engagement plays out can vary, but it always includes an attempt on our part to rearticulate our understanding in such a way to take into consideration the concerns, ideas, or questions raised by our interlocutor about the subject matter. For Gadamer, then, it is not that every interpretation is for someone, but rather that every interpretation is with someone. How does this compare to Royce’s trinity? According to Royce there is the interpreter, the interpreted, and that for whom the interpretation is made. But interpreting for someone and interpreting with someone are very different activities. In the first case the audience is kept in mind, but the interpretive process is a singular activity, not a shared activity. Interpreting with someone, in dialogue with someone, is irreducible to explanation in terms of alternating interpretations for one another and for that reason is a genuinely shared activity. Thus Royce’s account of interpretation is less intersubjective than Gadamer’s; for Royce, interpretation is not an actual dialogue between two persons, it is an act of one person attempting to establish a relation with another person. Since it is a singular act (for another), we can see how the (absent) other plays such an important role in the motivation of the interpretation. For Gadamer, interpretations aren’t for the sake of establishing community, as community is a condition for an interpretation to take place to begin with. We can understand a little better why Gadamer has to argue that incommensurability is impossible and why he connects interpretation, dialogue, and friendship so closely. If Royce is presenting interpretation as an attempt to regain community it is because he sees interpretation as a distinctive type of intellectual activity that occurs in the wake of

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crisis. Consider his example of exchanging money. We need to exchange money because we are no longer able to use our currency; the conditions of normal social interaction have broken down and we need to go through the process in order to reestablish them. Royce introduces the “for whom” as part of the interpretive process and he sees interpretation as an attempt to re-establish community because he has a good, pragmatist appreciation for the conditions of interpretation. Throughout most of his career Royce embraced the pragmatist principle that all judgments are constructive responses to a situation. Since interpretation is the key intellectual process whereby we are aware of our minds or other minds, the situation requiring a constructive response is a situation of intersubjective breakdown. We need to interpret because the meanings are unclear. This is not to say we are interpreting as isolated individuals; we are always interpreting given our intersubjectively established intellectual resources, our awareness of socially shared signs, and our metaphysically established desire for community. Understanding Royce’s emphases on the breakdown of social conditions that calls for interpretation helps us to see Stikkers’s points in a better light. Although Stikkers consistently misinterprets Gadamer, we can appreciate some general concerns grounded in his Roycean spirit. Stikkers emphasizes that Gadamer takes our traditions and our self as if they are firmly in place unconstituted by the interpretations. In fact, Gadamer doesn’t see them as unconstituted by our interpretations, but he does see them as in place, certainly in the sense that he doesn’t discuss any crises that would lead us to engage in interpretation to begin with. Since interpretations, for Royce, deal with relations to others and self-understanding, the crises would be crises of community or crises of self, and thus the role the interpretation plays in reconstituting community and self is all the more apparent. Gadamer’s examples of interpretation in contrast are particularly academic; he is concerned above all with the proper interpretation of the Greeks. We can see how Stikkers would be tempted to argue that, for Gadamer, interpretation is a purely intellectual activity, a relation between reader and text, rather than a communal activity. While Gadamer talks about an interpretation as answering a question, he doesn’t consider the activity of interpreting itself as necessarily arising out of a lived dissatisfaction, a question generating crisis.  He says just this in a 1903 version of his argument for error, “Error and Truth,” in Royce 2001.

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Is Gadamer so oblivious to the contexts that call for interpretation? Since Gadamer considers all intellectual activity, perception and conception included, as interpretation, he doesn’t focus on the specific case of social crisis. Since what counts as an interpretation is broader, the motivation for interpretation must likewise be much broader than social crisis. Nonetheless, in one sense Gadamer does preserve the insight that all calls for intentional interpretation arise out of a question (on this point he is sometimes compared to John Dewey). He argues that all interpretations involve application, which is the same as saying all interpretations respond to questions in such as way as to allow us to move forward differently afterward. Application is his term for the practical consequences of the completion of inquiry. Since all intellectual activity is interpretation, application is not merely a social moving forward, a reestablishment of community and self, it includes all comportment. According to Gadamer the virtue associated with application is phronesis—a moral and intellectual virtue guiding action. Stikkers’s point that “the absence of the other to whom one’s interpretation is addressed is especially conspicuous in Gadamer’s explication of interpretation as application” only makes sense in the context of Royce’s restricted understanding of interpretation where interpretation is clearly distinguished from perception and conception. So the difference between Royce and Gadamer has become focused on their disagreement about the scope of interpretation. Royce holds that interpretation is a special kind of knowledge distinct from perception and conception. Gadamer disagrees with Royce in holding that all perception and conception are also interpretations; all understanding is interpretive. Yet, when Gadamer claims interpretation is a dialogue with someone he is clearly only talking about explicit, intentional interpretations of a subject matter with a text or another person, not perceptions or conceptions. Royce therefore has a point. Even if we were to grant that Gadamer is correct in following Martin Heidegger and arguing that we are fundamentally interpretive beings and that not only all our intellectual activity, but all our actions, are only properly understood as interpretations, this should not preclude us from distinguishing those interpretations that belong to our everyday, unreflective activities from those that are conscious and explicit. When a person walks into a room and sits in a chair, that person is expressing an interpretation of his or her surroundings and his or her place in those surroundings. But that activity is different from the one that occurs when a person walks into a

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foreign space and has to think about where to sit, and both are different from the activity of interpreting a confusing text (or interpreting what someone else means) when the meaning isn’t apparent. Interpretation as a conscious, deliberate activity is what occurs when meanings come up short, and these meanings are always social meanings. So explicit, intentional interpretation is a social activity geared toward the rehabilitation of a disrupted sense of community or self. Gadamer should be completely amenable to this differentiation, as it would square with what he has to say about friendship and community. Moreover Gadamer can explain, perhaps better than Royce, how it is that the community is re-established since his account of interpretation is explicitly dialogical. It needs to be pointed out, however, in contrast to Royce, that just because intentional interpretation is irreducibly social that doesn’t mean that everyday interpretation is not. Our actions, perceptions, and conceptions are themselves intersubjective in the sense that they are conditioned by and express the traditions out of which we live. In the end, Royce is right to isolate interpretation as a class of intellectual activity with a uniquely social nature; hermeneutics should embrace this distinction and work to show its consequences. Traditions are always intersubjective. Conflicts between traditions are thus social conflicts; they are the kinds of crises that Royce would put forward as inspiring the need for interpretation. To do that, however, requires careful reading and articulating of both traditions in such a way that they can be seen at some juncture as addressing similar questions. How they answer the questions differently then becomes the key for seeing how their other differences play out and what we have to learn from them.

Works cited Ferraris, Maurizio. 1996. History of Hermeneutics. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1991. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum. ———. 1999. Hermeneutics, Religion and Ethics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grondin, Jean. 1994. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Palmer, Richard. 1969. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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Royce, Josiah. 1968. The Problem of Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, vol. 1. Ed. Frank Oppenheim. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press. Stikkers, Kenneth. 2001.“Royce and Gadamer on Interpretation as the Constitution of Community,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15 (1): 14-19.

6 Ricoeur’s Narrative Hermeneutics in Relationship with Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics: Continuity & Discontinuity

Keith D’Souza

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n this essay I attempt to show how the ‘triple-mimesis’ of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative may be understood to be a reappropriation as well as a reformulation of allied concepts in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. I do not claim that Ricoeur’s triple-mimesis is a conscious and systematic development of allied concepts within Truth and Method. Instead, I make the weaker claim that each of the elements of the triple-mimesis may be seen to be in continuity with key elements of Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory as spelled out in Truth and Method, albeit reformulated in the context of narrative hermeneutics. While there are many dimensions of continuity between these related concepts, we shall see that there are also significant strands of discontinuity. This will help to highlight the manner in which Ricoeur advances the project of philosophical hermeneutics in a narrative, methodological, critical and normative direction.  Temps et récit (Time and Narrative) is Ricoeur’s trilogy on narrative theory. The first volume was published in French in 1983 and translated into English in 1984. The second was published in French in 1984 and translated into English in 1985. The third was published in French in 1985 and translated into English in 1988. Hayden White, himself an expert on literary and historical theory, describes Time and Narrative as, “the most important synthesis of literary and historical theory produced in our century” (White 1987, 170).  Ricoeur does not explicitly use the expression ‘narrative hermeneutics’ to refer to his project in Time and Narrative. However, he does use the expression ‘narrative theory,’ on occasion. I will use the term ‘narrative hermeneutics’ to represent the specifically hermeneutical features of Ricoeur’s narrative theory.

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I will first point out the significance of the triple-mimesis for narrative hermeneutics, and then indicate why I choose to relate this complex concept within Time and Narrative with allied concepts in Truth and Method. I will then proceed to an analysis of the nature of the relationship between these respective concepts.

The significance of the triple-mimesis within narrative hermeneutics Ricoeur adopts Aristotle’s treatment of mimesis in the Poetics as a starting point for his own narrative analysis. Aristotle uses mimesis in connection with the construction of a muthos or plot of a narrative (especially a tragic narrative). Ricoeur’s narrative hermeneutics originates with a creative synthesis of this Aristotelian understanding of the plot (muthos) in the construction of narratives with the Augustinian understanding of the subjective distention of the soul (distentio animi) to account for the paradoxes (aporias) of temporal understanding. It is this creative synthesis that leads Ricoeur to conclude that, Between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience there exists a correlation that is not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural form of necessity. To put it another way, time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence (Ricoeur 1984, 52, original italics).

In this essay, we will only focus on the narrative dimension (and not on the temporal dimension) of this equation between time and narrative. Ricoeur highlights three key elements or moments of narrative activity, viz., the triple-mimesis, that have to do with the condition, the act and the consequence of narration, respectively. In doing so, he has provided us with a far more complex understanding of narrative theory than that presented by Aristotle. First of all, what is presupposed in narrative activity (in the reporting, writing, reading, acting, viewing and living of narratives) is a shared understanding of different facets of human action. This is what Ricoeur identifies as the level of the ‘prefiguration’ of narratives (or mimesis1). Secondly, Ricoeur examines the nature  In Time and Narrative, Vol.1, Ch.3, Ricoeur provides us with a detailed overview of this notion of the triple-mimesis.

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of both historical and fictional narratives, distinguishing between the hermeneutical features of these two modes of narrative discourse. This is the level of the ‘configuration’ of narratives (or mimesis2). Finally, Ricoeur explores the manner in which narratives can have an impact on human action via the act of ‘reading.’ This is the level of the ‘refiguration’ of human action on account of a productive encounter with narratives (or mimesis3). I consider these three concepts to be the formal principles of narrative hermeneutics. The triple-mimesis does not designate three separate types of mimeses, but rather three different moments of one complex mimetic activity, even though for Ricoeur,“‘configuration’ constitutes the pivot of this analysis” (Ricoeur 1984, 53).‘Prefiguration’ thus constitutes the condition of the possibility of ‘configuration,’ ‘configuration’ constitutes the condition of the possibility of ‘refiguration,’ and ‘refiguration’ constitutes the condition of the possibility of a new order of ‘prefiguration.’ This would be the equivalent of the hermeneutical circle or the hermeneutical spiral in Ricoeur’s narrative theory. Furthermore, between ‘prefiguration’ and ‘configuration,’ and between ‘configuration’ and ‘refiguration,’ imagination plays a very significant role. This is because the same set of facts or events at the stage of ‘prefiguration’ could lead to different narrative configurations at the stage of ‘configuration,’ while any given fictional or historical narrative could lead to quite different types of appropriation and human action at the stage of ‘refiguration.’ Why is this notion of the triple-mimesis so fundamental to Ricoeur’s narrative theory? First of all, there is a methodological value in an examination of the triple-mimesis in terms of the larger thesis of Time and Narrative, viz., the resolution of temporal paradoxes at the practical level by narrative. Ricoeur methodologically reduces the larger speculative problem of time-analysis to the more focused and practical analysis of the experience of time at the level of narrative mimesis. Furthermore,  In Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, Ricoeur systematically discusses the contributions of the different philosophical approaches towards time. His main contention is that while each of these approaches has something positive to contribute, it does not by itself resolve all of the paradoxes (aporia) connected with time. For example, Aristotle focused on the cosmological understanding of time, while Augustine focused on the subjective or psychological understanding of time. Kant demonstrated the transcendental nature of the possibility of understanding temporal concepts, but not cosmological time itself. Husserl’s phenomenological epoché does not help explain objective time. Heidegger’s

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he affirms that, “to resolve the problem of the relation between time and narrative I must establish the mediating role of emplotment between a stage of practical experience that precedes it and a stage that succeeds it” (Ricoeur 1984, 53). Secondly, there is a phenomenological value in the triple-mimesis. Like Augustine’s distentio animi (distention of the mind or soul), Husserl’s intentio animi (intention of the mind) provides an account of the subjective nature of temporal consciousness. However, unlike Ricoeur, Husserl does not employ Aristotle’s notion of the muthos (plot) in order to provide a narrative foundation for the phenomenological experience of temporal consciousness. By providing this narrative framework, Ricoeur complements and completes the study of temporal consciousness which Husserl inaugurated from a phenomenological perspective. Thirdly, there is a theoretical value of the triple-mimesis in terms of literary and historical theory. Ricoeur borrows liberally from historical and literary theorists in the development of his narrative theory in Time and Narrative. But his detailed analysis of the triple-mimesis from a phenomenological and hermeneutical perspective is a unique and significant contribution to literary theory. Finally, there is a novel hermeneutical value of the triple-mimesis. For unlike any other hermeneutical theorist, and unlike any of his own previous reflections over hermeneutics, Ricoeur for the first time provides us with the rudiments of a new type of hermeneutical theory, viz., narrative hermeneutics. Heidegger provided an analysis of Dasein which was largely future-oriented, while Gadamer, influenced by Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics, adopted an approach that was fundamentally past or tradition-oriented. Ricoeur synthesizes these approaches within his narrative hermeneutics by working out the categorical framework through which we experience temporal and narrative intentionality, viz., the triple-mimesis. In the presentation and discussion that follows, I will focus mainly on this last hermeneutical dimension of the triple-mimesis.

analysis of Dasein, following Husserl, does not help explain objective time. Neither of these approaches helps to resolve the paradox of time. One of the primary theses of Time and Narrative is to propose narrative intentionality as the resolution of the primary paradoxes connected with time, albeit on the practical level of human action, and not on a theoretical or discursive level per se.

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The rationale behind relating the triple-mimesis with Truth and Method The reasons for choosing Truth and Method as representative of Gadamer’s hermeneutical position with regard to its narrative development in the thought of Ricoeur are manifold. It is true that Gadamer has written much more on hermeneutics since Truth and Method was first published. Especially after his debates with Habermas and Apel in the 1960s and 1970s, he has refined some of the themes and epistemological claims in Truth and Method, especially stressing the theme of phronesis or practical wisdom. However, Truth and Method continues to be generally recognized as his magnum opus in the field of hermeneutical theory, and to a large extent Gadamer has not substantially distanced himself from its major hermeneutical claims in a systematic manner. Ricoeur himself, in an autobiographical essay which features the many philosophers who have had an influence on him, states quite plainly that “the hermeneutics illustrated and brilliantly renovated by

 For a concise presentation of the development of this debate, see Graeme Nicholson,“Answers to Critical Theory,” in Silverman 1991. For a more detailed presentation, see Teigas 1995, and How 1995. Also, for a succinct presentation of the objections raised by Gadamer and Habermas with respect to each other’s positions, see Gorner 2000.  See the Section entitled ‘Truth and Method Reconsidered,’ in “Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,” for the more important of these intellectual developments since Truth and Method was published (Gadamer 1997, 4057). This essay is the inaugural autobiographical essay in the book devoted to Gadamer in the ‘Library of Living Philosophers’ Series, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn. In this essay, Gadamer himself largely focuses on Truth and Method as the locus of his hermeneutical thought—most later developments are viewed with reference to this foundational work. Writing thirty-seven years after Truth and Method was first published, Gadamer somewhat regrets both his polemical approach against the natural sciences and his lack of appreciation of the achievements of the social sciences in terms of adopting a methodological approach towards the truth. However, he has not attempted to substantially and methodically revise his hermeneutical theory in the light of these advances in the human sciences.

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Gadamer, whose great work Truth and Method … became for me a privileged reference” (Ricoeur 1995, 22). For the purpose of this essay, however, there is no major need to go much beyond Truth and Method in order to be able to relate Gadamer’s hermeneutics with Ricoeur’s narrative theory. For in Time and Narrative, Ricoeur explicitly mentions the correspondence between the stage of the ‘refiguration’ of human action and Gadamer’s notion of ‘application’ (Ricoeur 1984, 70). Gadamer considers the dimension of ‘application’ to be an intrinsic part of the hermeneutical process, besides the more obvious roles of ‘explanation’ and‘understanding’ in the act of interpretation (Gadamer 1989, 307ff.). ‘Application’ is the practical consequence of the process of interpretation via a ‘fusion of horizons’ with the object of interpretation. Both the interpreter and the object of interpretation (a text, a work of art) have their own ‘horizons of meaning.’ After an encounter, the ‘horizon of meaning’ of the interpreter is widened. As a result, new possibilities of meaning unfold in terms of the interpreter’s own life situation. We shall see how this concept of ‘application’ is narratively analogous with Ricoeur’s notion of ‘refiguration.’ Starting with this most obvious correspondence pointed out by Ricoeur himself, I have attempted to identify two other concepts within Truth and Method that best correspond to the other stages of the triplemimesis, viz., ‘prefiguration’ and ‘configuration.’ The concept that I best associate with Ricoeur’s notion of ‘prefiguration’ is Gadamer’s notion of Wirkungsgeschichte or‘effective history.’‘Effective history’ is the principle of historical efficacy, and represents the cumulative effect of historical consciousness, i.e., the operative effect which the history of one’s tradition has had on one’s consciousness. Together, ‘effective history’ and its resultant ‘horizon of meaning’ constitute the hermeneutical condition of the possibility of knowledge in the human sciences and the humanities. Finally, the concept that I best associate with ‘configuration’ is the notion of mimesis as presented in Truth and Method. While discussing  This is from Ricoeur’s autobiographical essay in the ‘Library of Living Philosophers’ Series, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, published two years before the one on Gadamer (Ricoeur 1995).  Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, in their translation of Truth and Method (Gadamer 1989; which I use throughout this work) use the term “history of effect,” as a translation of Wirkungsgeschichte. I much prefer “effective history,” however, used in the first English translation of Truth and Method by Garrett Barden and John Cumming (Gadamer 1975).

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the nature of the creation and presentation of a work of art, Gadamer borrows the notion of mimesis from Aristotle’s treatment of the subject in the Poetics. However, for Gadamer, the phenomenon of creative representation does not just involve the activity of imitating human action, but rather constitutes the activity of grasping the essence (or the truth) of the subject matter being portrayed or enacted. Participation in the process of representation reveals the truth of the subject matter under consideration. The resultant ‘understanding’ is not objective but participatory in nature. In the following section, I intend to demonstrate that there is continuity between these respective concepts as well as change, within the context of narrative hermeneutics.

Continuity and discontinuity between Truth and Method and the triple-mimesis 1. ‘Prefiguration’ and ‘effective history’ Gadamer’s notion of ‘effective history’ and Ricoeur’s notion of ‘prefiguration’ (or mimesis1) both have to do with the conditions of the possibility of knowledge—knowledge in the human sciences and humanities, and a more specific knowledge concerning human action, respectively. Accordingly, for Gadamer, ‘effective history’ constitutes the condition of the possibility of understanding ‘being-in-the-world,’ while for Ricoeur, ‘prefiguration’ constitutes the condition of the possibility of understanding ‘doing-in-the-world.’ The concept of ‘effective history’ is fundamental to Gadamer’s project in Truth and Method, for in keeping with the project of Heidegger, he wishes to demonstrate the fact that the process of understanding transcends the traditional epistemological opposition between a knowing subject and a known object. But Gadamer further refines Heidegger’s project in terms of traditional and historical parameters. In his Foreword to the Second Edition of Truth and Method, Gadamer states,  See Schweiker 1990, where the author relates the mimetic aspects of the thought of Gadamer, Ricoeur and Kierkegaard. Schweiker argues that Gadamer focuses on ‘understanding’ as the mimesis of the ‘world,’ while Ricoeur focuses on ‘narrative’ as the mimesis of ‘time,’ and Kierkegaard focuses on the ‘self ’ as mimesis of ‘life.’

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keith d’souza The purpose of my investigation is not to offer a general theory of interpretation and a differential account of its methods (which Emilio Betti has done so well) but to discover what is common to all modes of understanding and to show that understanding is never a subjective relation to a given ‘object’ but to the history of its effect [Wirkungsgeschichte]; in other words, understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood (Gadamer 1989, xxxi, italics mine).

Understanding is thus constituted by an ontological relationship between subject and object which is influenced by historically influenced cultural and linguistic practices. Similarly, Ricoeur lays down the conditions for the possibility of understanding ‘human action’ in terms of “a semantics of action,”“symbolic mediations of action” and “temporal elements” (Ricoeur 1984, 54). For Ricoeur, the world of temporal objects of investigation (i.e., specific data of historical or fictional human action) can only be understood depending upon these prior conditions of the possibility of temporal understanding: “whatever the innovative force of poetic composition within the field of our temporal existence may be, the composition of the plot is grounded in a pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character” (Ricoeur 1984, 54). While Ricoeur does not explicitly relate ‘effective history’ with ‘prefiguration,’ he seems to affirm this relationship when he states that, “the possibility of historical experience in general resides in our capacity to remain exposed to the effects of history, to borrow Gadamer’s category of Wirkungsgeschichte” (Ricoeur 1991, 181). From a temporal perspective, human action will necessarily have a narrative structure (i.e., a beginning, a middle and an end), in some cases explicit, in others implicit. Also, actions take place within social contexts and hence assume their meaning from such contexts. For Gadamer, the ‘horizon of meaning’ that results from the process of ‘effective history’ constitutes the specific condition of an act of knowledge. Likewise, for Ricoeur, we already live personal and collective narratives (by way of personal and social projects), know what it is to engage with narratives (e.g., historical, legal, fictional, scriptural narratives), and know what factors go to make up a narrative (a beginning, a middle, an end; the development of characters, causal connections between events, subplots, etc.). ‘Prefiguration’ thus constitutes the matrix of preconditions for narrative understanding in general.

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Where both Gadamer and Ricoeur are in agreement is the fact that they conceive ‘effective history’ and ‘prefiguration’ as pre-conscious conditions of knowledge and consciousness. Wirkungsgeschichte (‘effective history’), for Gadamer, is different from wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein (‘consciousness of effective history’). That is why he prefers wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein to be considered as “more being than consciousness” (Gadamer 1976, 38; 1997, 47).10 Ricoeur too considers ‘prefiguration’ to be at a pre-conscious or existential level rather than at more reflective levels of narrative consciousness such as ‘configuration’ or ‘refiguration.’ ‘Prefiguration’ is more of an ontological understanding of temporality, i.e., the manner in which an understanding of ‘doingin-the-world’ takes place spontaneously and unconsciously. Ricoeur specifically uses the Heideggerian expression ‘being-in-the-world’ to refer to ‘prefiguration’ (Ricoeur 1984, 81). Furthermore, both Gadamer and Ricoeur presuppose a common world of meaning and reference. For Gadamer, consciousness and subjectivity are a function of a shared‘linguisticality’ which has its roots in traditional practices. So also, for Ricoeur, we share a common understanding of the semantics of action, of cultural symbols, of temporal terms, and of a general understanding of time itself at the level of Innerzeitigkeit. Gadamer’s presupposition of a common ‘being-in-the-world’ is echoed in Ricoeur’s presupposition of a common ‘doing-in-the-world,’ which is the mimetic condition of the possibility of temporal consciousness. The phenomenological analyses of Gadamer and Ricoeur do not begin with individual consciousness in a Cartesian or Husserlian manner, but instead presuppose a Heideggerian ‘being-with’ another (Mitsein). There are indeed many similarities between ‘effective history’ and ‘prefiguration’ in terms of how they function as conditions of the possibility of knowledge and consciousness. However, the primary difference between these two concepts—besides the more obvious difference in emphasis between the realms of ‘being’ and ‘doing’—is that ‘effective history’ entails the positing of more material claims with regard to the conditions of understanding, as compared to‘prefiguration.’ The implicit 10 In“On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, while discussing the nature of hermeneutical reflection, Gadamer states,“reflection on a given preunderstanding brings before me something that otherwise happens behind my back. Something—but not everything, for what I have called the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein is inescapably more being than consciousness, and being is never fully manifest” (Gadamer 1976, 38).

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narrative ‘givenness’ of consciousness at the formal level is the condition through which human beings understand the phenomenon of time at the practical level.‘Prefiguration’ serves as a correlate of ‘effective history’ primarily at the formal level of ‘understanding,’ because it provides a specifically narrative dimension of understanding, i.e., a sense of what it means to engage in human action with a complex set of goals, purposes, causal sequences, temporally relevant terminology, etc. At the material level, however, this ‘givenness’ is the result of specific temporal terms and traditional and cultural practices, as well as the influence that past narratives have on consciousness. Ricoeur explains ‘prefiguration’ in terms of semantic, symbolic and temporal features which constitute a “storehouse of those expressions that are most appropriate to what is properly human in our experience” (Ricoeur 1984, 62). While ‘semantic’ and ‘temporal’ features of ‘prefiguration’ have to do with the way in which we understand actions temporally, the only element that has material dimensions to it is the area of symbolic patterns of behavior which are culture-dependent, as it constitutes “signs, rules and norms” (Ricoeur 1984, 57). However, unlike Gadamer, who is averse to methodological inquiry and analysis in general (at least in Truth and Method), Ricoeur allows for the possibility of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ or a moment of reflective and critical distanciation from these cultural “signs, rules and norms.” The three ‘masters of suspicion’ whom Ricoeur has in mind are Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, because they attempt a radical questioning of socially constituted prejudices: “the Genealogy of Morals in Nietzsche’s sense, the theory of ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideals and illusions in Freud’s sense represent three convergent procedures of demystification” (Ricoeur 1970, 34). In line with this hermeneutics of suspicion, Ricoeur recognizes the validity of the critique of hermeneutical prejudice as expressed by the critical theorists Apel and Habermas. In one of the key articles representing the debate between Gadamer and Habermas, the latter argues that“in grasping the genesis of the tradition from which it proceeds and on which it turns back, reflection shakes the dogmatism of life-practices... A structure of preunderstanding or prejudgment that has been rendered transparent can no longer function as a prejudice” (Habermas 1977, 357-58). By subscribing to the notion of a moment of critical distanciation from texts in general—and by implication, narratives in particular—Ricoeur would be in agreement with Habermas, with regard to this moment of reflective and even methodological analysis. Ricoeur largely adopts a

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mediatory and dialectical position between Gadamer on the one hand and Apel and Habermas on the other.11 For Gadamer, ‘effective history’ is “the history within whose effects we all exist. It is something that we can never completely go beyond” (Gadamer 1997, 47). That is why, for him, “historical consciousness is itself situated in the web of historical effects” (Gadamer 1989, 300), and “the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being” (Gadamer 1989, 276-77, original italics).12 Ricoeur’s understanding of ‘temporality’ or ‘narrativity’ however, does not include an understanding of ‘historicality’ in this determining manner, because of his willingness to employ critical criteria as part of the interpretive process. This is where the notion of ‘prefiguration’ clearly has far less of a material foundation to it as compared to ‘effective history.’ In addition to this critical dimension, Ricoeur also incorporates a distinctly moral dimension within hermeneutical theory, whereby ‘signs,’ ‘rules’ and ‘norms’ at the level of ‘prefiguration’ may be in need of evaluation by using criteria stemming from moral reflection.13 Follow11 For Ricoeur’s reconciliatory position between hermeneutics and critical theory, see“Ethics and Culture. Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue” (Ricoeur 1973) and “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology” (Ricoeur 1981). 12 Georgia Warnke points to three important dimensions of Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice as a condition of the possibility of knowledge (Warnke 1987, 75-82). First of all, influenced by Husserl, Gadamer stresses the intentionality or anticipatory dimension of consciousness: “‘the very perception of objects involves projections of meaning, or interpretations” (Warnke 1987, 76). This entails that“pure seeing and pure hearing are dogmatic abstractions which artificially reduce phenomena. Perception always includes meaning” (Gadamer 1989, 92). This is the phenomenological equivalent of the hermeneutical circle, wherein the part (the abstracted phenomenon) can only be understood in terms of the whole (the background phenomenon), and vice versa. Secondly, influenced by Heidegger, Gadamer claims that interpretation is rooted in the particular situation of the interpreter (and in the fore-structure of understanding):“Even before I begin consciously to interpret a text or grasp the meaning of an object, I have already placed it within a certain context (Vorhabe), approached it from a certain perspective (Vorsicht), and conceived of it in a certain way (Vorgriff)” (Warnke 1987, 77). Finally, though, Gadamer adds something original and quite distinct from the subjective and personal approaches of Husserl and Heidegger, viz., a historical or traditional dimension of understanding. 13 I will follow Ricoeur’s general distinction between ethical and moral dimensions of normativity. ‘Ethical’ principles represent teleological, culture-specific

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ing Aristotle, Gadamer largely conceives of normativity in terms of a teleological ‘ethics’ inbuilt into traditional practices, rules and goals.14 However, in From Text to Action and Oneself as Another, Ricoeur recognizes the necessity for a Kantian deontological moment which would serve to critically evaluate these practices, rules and goals:15 or contextual rules for human action, whereas ‘moral’ principles represent universal, reflective principles for human action. Aristotelian teleological principles would thus constitute an ‘ethics,’ for Ricoeur, whereas Kantian deontological principles constitutes a ‘morality.’ 14 For a short presentation of Gadamer’s ethical position—which is largely influenced by the Nicomachean Ethics—see Georgia Warnke, “Hermeneutics, Ethics and Politics” (2002). In the section titled, ‘The hermeneutic relevance of Aristotle’ in Truth and Method, Gadamer agrees with Aristotle that the teacher of ethics (and indeed every ethical person),“is always already involved in a moral and political context and acquires his image of the thing from that standpoint. He does not himself regard the guiding principles that he describes as knowledge that can be taught. They are valid only as schemata” (Gadamer 1989, 320). Thus, for Gadamer, there can be no certainty in phronesis as there is in theoria and in techne: “Even if we conceive this knowledge in ideal perfection, it is perfect deliberation with oneself (euboulia) and not knowledge in the manner of a techne … There can be no anterior certainty concerning what the good life is directed toward as a whole” (Gadamer 1989, 321). This ambiguity with respect to the moral realm arises because of the nature of moral law itself, which does not have the certitude that natural law possesses. Instead, the guiding principles of moral law are “not norms to be found in the stars, nor do they have an unchanging place in a natural moral universe, so that all that would be necessary would be to perceive them. Nor are they mere conventions, but really do correspond to the nature of the thing—except that the latter is always itself determined in each case by the use the moral consciousness makes of them” (Gadamer 1989, 320). The reference to ‘norms to be found in the stars’ is a likely caricature on the part of Gadamer of the Kantian image of moral law, which, for Kant, was as certain and definite as that of the stars above. 15 In a rare instance, Gadamer admits of the significance of Kant’s deontological approach to practical action, but in order to bolster his own distrust of enlightenment rationality: “in Kant’s Foundations for a Metaphysics of Morals I believed I had found, and I still believe this today, what is, within limits, an unshakable truth … It is that the impulses to enlightenment should not lead to a social utilitarianism” (Gadamer 1997, 56). Georgia Warnke argues that Gadamer provides a critical form of ethical reflection “in the move he makes

Ricoeur’s Narrative Hermeneutics & Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics 149 Kantian morality … constitutes the moment of interiorization, universalization, and formalization with which Kant identified practical reason. This moment is necessary, for it alone posits the autonomy of a responsible subject, that is to say, a subject who recognizes himself capable of doing what at the same time he believes he ought to do (Ricoeur 1991, 200).

However, unlike Kant’s duty-oriented approach to practical action, Ricoeur takes the comparatively more affective principle of the ‘Golden Rule’ as his primary deontological principle. The positive (obligatory) formulation of the rule is expressed by Luke as “treat others as you would like them to treat you” (Luke 6:31), while the negative (interdictory) formulation is expressed by “Hillel, the Jewish master of Saint Paul (Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath, 31a): ‘Do not do unto your neighbor what you would hate him to do to you’” (Ricoeur 1992, 219). By identifying the primary deontological principle as the ‘Golden Rule,’ Ricoeur retains the formalism and universality of the second of Kant’s categorical imperatives (viz., to treat others as ends and never only as means), as well as its affective (or ‘inclinational’) dimensions. The formal, universal and rational dimension of the principle derives from the conviction that no one would like to have something done to himself or herself that is hateful, and everyone would like something done to himself or herself that is desirable or loving. The inclinational or affective dimension of the principle has to do with the emotions of hate and love, thus enabling a moral system to combine rectitude with an inclination towards what is emotionally attractive and an overcoming of what is emotionally repulsive.16 On account of this possibility of a critical and moral distanciation from the effects of the past, Ricoeur does not harbor an attitude of from Aristotle to Kant and to what he calls the moral experience of the ‘thou’,” in Truth and Method, 358-61 (Warnke 2002, 91). However, unlike Ricoeur, Gadamer does not seem to systematically develop this moment of autonomous moral reflection which would serve to reflectively transcend tradition-based practical action. 16 See “Practical Action” in From Text to Action (Ricoeur 1991) and “The Self and the Moral Norm” in Oneself as Another (Ricoeur 1992) for Ricoeur’s critique of the Kantian deontological position with regard to practical action. See John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, eds. Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought (2002), for a discussion of different aspects of this specifically moral dimension within Ricoeur’s thought.

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conservatism with regard to the construction and interpretation of foundational events and texts of the past. While he does speak specifically of a “narrative tradition” that bears the marks not only of a general narrative theory but also of seminal works in particular, e.g., the Iliad and Oedipus Rex, it is quite clear that he makes room for both a ‘sedimentation’ and an ‘innovation’ of this narrative tradition, and by extension, of social values and norms (Ricoeur 1984, 69-70). Gadamer also allows for innovation in understanding, but he would be hesitant in employing a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ as this entails a methodological process of suspicion and domination of the text rather than a submission to what the text proposes. Ricoeur, however, terms innovation as a “counterpoint to sedimentation” (Ricoeur 1984, 70). By consciously emphasizing the role of ‘innovation’ in the construction and interpretation of texts and narratives, Ricoeur clearly does not consider ‘prefiguration’ to be such a limiting and determining condition of the possibility of narrative consciousness. While it may be argued that Gadamer’s concept of ‘tradition’ is not static but instead open to change, it seems to me that Ricoeur provides us with a more dynamic understanding of ‘traditionality,’ in terms of his proposal of a constant dialectic between the ‘sedimentation’ and ‘innovation’ of a narrative tradition. This is because, for Ricoeur, it is the past, present and future that are connected by this semantics of desire—present action is rooted in the past, but must be evaluated in terms of methodological, critical and normative criteria, so that it can bear positive consequences in the future. The future is more important for Ricoeur than for Gadamer, because of the former’s emphasis on the conditions and consequences of practical action. Ricoeur’s notion of narrative consciousness is thus a fecund combination of Heidegger’s focus on the future and Gadamer’s focus on the past as the locus of authenticity, based on an Aristotelian notion of the ‘plot’ in terms of constituting mimetic activity. Heidegger understood ‘Care’ to function at the most primordial level of temporality, i.e., Zeitlichkeit, in terms of a ‘being-towards-death.’ Gadamer took ‘Bildung’ based on a rootedness in tradition to represent authenticity. Thus, for him, the values and desires of the past are given priority over the values and desires of the present or the future. That is why Gadamer criticizes Habermas, because the latter focuses on a future that we do not know (i.e., that which represents a ‘utopian’ situation) rather than finding worth in a traditional reality with which we are already familiar. For Ricoeur, however, ‘Care’ is manifested even at the level of

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Innerzeitigkeit, the realm of ordinary time, which includes the past, the present and the future (Ricoeur 1984, 60-64).

2. ‘Configuration’ and the ‘mimesis’ of Truth and Method ‘Configuration’ (or mimesis2) has to do with the construction of fictional and historical narratives, and entails numerous constraints that govern the formulation of a meaningful plot (or muthos). ‘Configuration’ imposes consonance (a complete plot) on dissonant components (discrete events). Every fictional and historical work involves the construction of a plot which holds together different characters, causal connections, sub-plots, etc. This is primarily a work of imagination, as one has to construct a meaningful plot from the myriad events that have taken place (in a historical work), or that one imagines to take place (in a fictional work). But ‘configuration’ also presupposes a shared participation in creative activity, because a work of history or fiction is a public work, i.e., a work that is created to be read, heard, viewed or enacted. This understanding of ‘configuration’ shares features with Gadamer’s understanding of mimesis in Truth and Method, as both concepts deal with the activity of the representation or reproduction of human action in a narrative form.17 Ricoeur would be in agreement with Gadamer when the latter points out that there are limits to creative expression in mimetic activity: for the writer, free invention is always only one side of a mediation conditioned by values already given. He does not freely invent his plot, however much he imagines that he does. Rather, even today the mimesis theory still retains something of its old validity. The writer’s free invention is the presentation of a common truth that is binding on the writer also … The player, sculptor, or viewer is never simply swept away into a strange world of magic, of intoxication, of dream; rather, it is always his own world, and he comes to belong to it more fully by recognizing himself more profoundly in it. There remains a continuity of meaning which links the work of art with the existing 17 Gadamer discusses the theme of mimesis in Truth and Method, Part I, Section II.1.D. This sub-division (‘The Example of the Tragic’) falls within the larger section on ‘play,’ entitled, ‘Play as the Clue to Ontological Explanation.’ Gadamer begins the analysis of mimesis with tragic drama, but extends his mimetic theory even to the plastic arts (sculpture and architecture), and to literature in general, for all of these involve some form of participation.

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The obvious element of continuity between the notion of mimesis in Truth and Method and that of ‘configuration’ in Time and Narrative stems from the fact that both concepts are derived from Aristotle’s presentation of mimesis in the Poetics. Both concepts cover the activity of creative representation in terms of specific ‘figurations’ of human action. However, the primary difference between Gadamer’s treatment of mimesis and Ricoeur’s treatment of ‘configuration’ is that the former is influenced by a Platonic epistemology, while the latter is influenced by a temporal appropriation of the Aristotelian treatment of dramatic presentation. Thus, for Gadamer, the construction and presentation of narratives is intended to communicate a truth whose essence, once appropriated, would lead to a better understanding of ‘being-in-theworld.’ For Ricoeur, however, mimetic construction and presentation is intended to lead to a better temporally related understanding of ‘doing-in-the-world.’ In order to present his own understanding of aesthetic truth, Gadamer reinterprets Plato’s approach to art in a unique and productive manner, viz., as an important medium through which truth may be communicated: What we experience in a work of art and what invites our attention is how true it is—i.e., to what extent one knows and recognizes something and oneself … In recognition what we know emerges, as if illuminated, from all the contingent and variable circumstances that condition it; it is grasped in its essence. It is known as something. This is the central motif of Platonism (Gadamer 1989, 114-15).

Ricoeur, however, reads Plato in the more conventional fashion as one who is dismissive of the cognitive and revelatory function of art, and he accordingly takes objection to this assessment of art: Far from producing only weakened images of reality—shadows, as in the Platonic treatment of the eikon in painting or writing (Phaedrus 274e-77e)—literary works depict reality by augmenting it with meanings that themselves depend upon the virtues of abbreviation, saturation, and culmination, so strikingly illustrated by emplotment (Ricoeur 1984, 80, original italics).

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For this reason, Ricoeur prefers to adopt Aristotle as his mentor, especially in the production of works of dramatic configuration. That is why Aristotelian concepts such as poiesis, mimesis, phronesis and praxis play a significant role in Ricoeur’s narrative theory. For Aristotle, “poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars” (Poetics 1451b5-7). Gadamer tends to apply this Aristotelian estimation of poetic works to art in general, and hence considers all creative activity as mimetic. This is largely because of his adoption of Platonic essentialism in his hermeneutical theory.18 That is why he uses mimesis in art to arrive at truth. However, he does recognize that mimesis in a strict sense in the form of drama (as depicted in Aristotle’s Poetics) is the most representative of a form of art that leads to truth, because of its participatory nature and the evocation of powerful emotions that lead to a change of ‘being’ on the part of those who participate in a dramatic presentation. For Ricoeur too, all creative activity (poiesis) is mimetic or metaphorical in a loose sense, and he would agree with Gadamer that mimesis leads to a new way of ‘seeing-as,’ which leads to a new way of ‘being-as.’ But Ricoeur adopts the more specific sense of mimesis which Aristotle adopts, viz., tragic works that best represent a narrative form, because there is a clear beginning, middle and end. This is because Ricoeur is not as much driven by the ontological concerns of Gadamer, as much as he is by practical and temporal concerns which Gadamer does not seem to take as seriously. However, unlike Aristotle, Ricoeur does not believe that historical works are merely descriptions of particular events rather than universally meaningful events. Instead, 18 However, Gadamer interprets Plato’s metaphysical realism in a non-conventional dialectical fashion: “Plato does not have a doctrine that one can simply learn from him, namely the ‘doctrine of ideas.’ And if he criticizes this doctrine in his Parmenides, this also does not mean that at that time he was beginning to have doubts about it. Rather, it means that the acceptance of the ‘ideas’ does not designate the acceptance of a doctrine so much as of a line of questioning that the doctrine has the task of developing and discussing. That is the Platonic dialectic … The work that goes on in a Platonic dialogue has its way of expressing this: it points towards the One, towards Being, the ‘Good,’ which is present in the order of the soul, in the constitution for the city, and in the structure of the world” (Gadamer 1997, 33). Gadamer’s interpretation of this dynamic realism of Plato is largely based on the contents of the Seventh Letter, the criticism of the ‘doctrine of ideas’ by Plato in the Parmenides, but most especially by the role and function of Socrates in the Dialogues.

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Ricoeur insists that historical works not only serve to describe particular episodes, but in the manner of fictional narratives, serve to inspire people to action, based both on the debt we owe to the past and the desire to construct a new social order on the basis of the positive or negative lessons we may learn from the past. This difference between the emphasis on ontological and epistemological concerns between Gadamer and Ricoeur is reflected in the manner in which they appropriate Kantian elements in their respective philosophies. Gadamer takes recourse to Kant’s third Critique (the ‘Critique of Judgment’) to justify his account of the truth of a work of art, but Ricoeur takes recourse to Kant’s first Critique (the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’), to illustrate his claim pertaining to the transcendental schematism that lies at the foundation of temporal and narrative consciousness.19 While in both cases there is a transcendental principle involved, in the case of Gadamer, it is more of a subjective one, because it involves aesthetic consciousness, whereas for Ricoeur it is more objective, because it involves the epistemological foundation of narrative structure, for the claim that the plot makes is commonly accessible and understandable to all who encounter the narrative. Thus, a judgment regarding the hermeneutical status of the narrative is not just a matter of subjective taste, but rather a process that involves an objective assessment of facts, and how these facts are articulated within a coherent and complete plot. In this regard, Ricoeur makes room for a distinctly explanatory moment in the process of interpretation, which Gadamer in general consciously avoids. Consequently, Gadamer’s relatively unconstrained notion of ‘play’ is hermeneutically more liberal as compared to Ricoeur’s more 19 Commenting on the nature of ‘configuration,’ Ricoeur invites us, “not to hesitate in comparing the production of the configurational act to the work of the productive imagination. This latter must be understood not as a psychologizing faculty but as a transcendental one. The productive imagination is not only rule-governed, it constitutes the generative matrix of rules. In Kant’s first Critique, the categories of the understanding are first schematized by the productive imagination. The schematism has this power because the productive imagination fundamentally has a synthetic function. It connects understanding and intuition by engendering syntheses that are intellectual and intuitive at the same time. Emplotment, too, engenders a mixed intelligibility between what has been called the point, theme, or thought of a story, and the intuitive presentation of circumstances, characters, episodes, and changes of fortune that make up the denouement. In this way, we may speak of a schematism of the narrative function” (Ricoeur 1984, 68).

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constrained notion of ‘emplotment,’ with regard to both historical and fictional narratives. Historians simply cannot ‘play’ with the truth, but are expected to represent it appropriately in their narrative account, however creatively. Also, the ‘play’ involved in fictional narratives is similarly constrained by factors such as semantic and temporal coherence, linguistic and symbolic meaningfulness, inner consistency of the depiction of characters and event, and the presence of a coherent and complete plot.20 In Interpretation Theory, The Rule of Metaphor, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another, Ricoeur advocates the methods of structuralism, and is open to the contributions of the social sciences and historical-critical research in general in order to provide an explanatory account of texts and narratives.21 That is why, for Ricoeur, a narrative configuration may be the object of structural analysis or any other form of systematic investigation, as part of the moment of ‘explanation’ of the historical or fictional narrative in question. Gadamer proposes that Aristotelian phronesis be used as a model for explanatory procedures in the human sciences and the humanities (i.e., he recommends that Wahrheit be appropriated via the method of phronesis rather than theoria), but Ricoeur uses phronesis not at the level of ‘explanation’ but rather at the level of ‘understanding’ and ‘application,’ when it comes to the interpretation of narratives. However, unlike the mainstream structuralist approach to texts, Ricoeur is ultimately interested in how the text relates to, or ties in with trans-textual personal and social reality. In this regard, he 20 According to Schweiker, Gadamer’s notion of ‘play’ (Spiel) has its roots in festive celebration and traditional religious cultic activity (Schweiker 1990, 45 ff.). While this creative approach towards ‘emplotment’ may be employed in the composition of fictional narratives, this approach does not manifest the gravity of the process of ‘emplotment’ Ricoeur seems to demand of historical narratives. 21 A study of the semiotic and semantic structure of the text would include the discipline of structuralism as well as historical-critical methods such as form criticism, rhetorical criticism, redaction (editorial) criticism, canonical criticism, source criticism, narrative criticism, etc.—methods which Ricoeur is open to and employs in his biblical interpretation. A text could also be explained from the point of view of the social sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, archeology, etc. Also, a study of the economic, political, religious, and cultural influences that may have influenced the formulation of the text could also help provide a more comprehensive ‘explanation’ of the text.

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is much closer to Gadamer than to the structuralists, for even though he allows for the role of method in interpretation, his primary dictum is, ‘explain more in order to understand better.’ The dichotomy of ‘truth versus method’ is thus a false one for Ricoeur. For in opposition to the structuralists, he would say, ‘be more methodical so that you can be more truthful,’ while in opposition to Gadamer, he would say, ‘be more methodical so that you can be more truthful.’ When it comes to fictional works, Gadamer is influenced by the ontological stance that Heidegger adopts towards the phenomenon of art. Art (especially poetry) for the later Heidegger is the privileged medium through which truth becomes unconcealed.22 But this revelation of truth which art brings to consciousness is a participatory revelation. There is no subject-object dichotomy while encountering a work of art. This is because the nature of a work of art is such that it makes sense only when one participates in it (e.g., when one listens to music; when one reads or listens to a story, when one sees a drama being enacted): “‘presentation’ is the mode of being of the work of art” (Gadamer 1989, 115). Ricoeur, on the other hand, seems to affirm the position of a personal, responsible and subjective creativity on the part of the author of the historical or fictional narrative. While he does insist upon general semantic, symbolic and temporal rules that constrain the construction of the narrative, the origin of the work of art or the narrative ‘configuration’ for Ricoeur is the artist himself or herself, and not ‘art’ in the abstract. The individual artist has to assume responsibility for the specific ‘configuration’ which is created, and not attribute what is produced to an impersonal entity, viz., ‘art.’ This matter of assuming moral responsibility for creative production does not seem to be systematically developed by Gadamer, and is in keeping with the reluctance on the part of Heidegger to work out an explicitly moral component within his ontological hermeneutics. Unlike Ricoeur, Gadamer does not consciously adopt any moral criteria to determine the course of narrative production or interpretation. As 22 In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger says, “Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealedness … Art then is the becoming and happening of truth … All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is as such, in essence, poetry … The origin of the work of art … is art. This is so because art is in its essence an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical” (Heidegger 1977, 178-87, original italics).

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pointed out earlier, in Oneself as Another, Ricoeur explicitly develops the moral features of creative and interpretive activity within the context of narrative hermeneutics. Ricoeur appeals to an interpretation of the moral universalism found in Kant’s second Critique (the ‘Critique of Practical Reason’) as the foundation for the possibility and necessity of employing moral norms in narrative hermeneutics. Accordingly, for Ricoeur, it would be imperative for both fictional and historical narratives to be subject to moral scrutiny, if they are intended for a public audience. Fictional works more obviously aim at changing narrative consciousness, especially at the level of ‘refiguration.’ Even if a fictional narrative is constructed purely or largely for entertainment, it still needs to meet minimal moral standards before it is published, so that it does not have a morally deleterious effect on the audience. This is usually the social responsibility of the publisher, and in the world of the audiovisual media, the responsibility of an official censor board. However, the authors of narrative texts to begin with need to recognize that they are subject to the critical and moral standards that we have discussed earlier. Even in the construction of historical narratives, the point is not merely to provide an objective account, but to engage in a creative and responsible reconstruction which is meant to communicate a message and bring about a change of perspective. Especially with reference to tragic historical episodes, Ricoeur calls our attention to the fact that, “fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep” (Ricoeur 1988, 188). Ricoeur is especially sensitive to the past and the debt we owe the past. When talking about the transition from inchoate narratives to articulated narratives, he speaks of “the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative” (Ricoeur 1984, 75). Thus, the historian needs to make claims that are not only true but also morally responsible, even though these claims will inadvertently be couched in terms borrowed from the field of fictive expression. Finally, both Gadamer and Ricoeur share in Hegel’s dialectical disposition towards the construction of historical narratives, albeit in a phenomenological rather than a systematic or metaphysical manner. This is because both Gadamer and Ricoeur rightly stress hermeneutical finitude rather than omniscience in the construction of historical narratives, for it is hermeneutically impossible to entirely overcome one’s finitude and to attempt to conceptually grasp the nature of absolute historical development. Commenting on the influence of Hegel on Gadamer,

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Domenico Jervolino states,“the appeal to Hegel does not imply a ‘return’ to Hegel in the sense of a retrieval of his system, but rather, we feel, a reappropriation of the spirit of dialectics beyond any possibility of a system” ( Jervolino 1996, 66). While this refusal to adopt Hegel’s system (or indeed any system at all) matches Gadamer’s suspicion of ‘method’ at arriving at truth, Ricoeur complements this Hegelian dialectical and historical phenomenology with the epistemological foundation of a Kantian and transcendental understanding of narrative structure. Hence narrative construction is not only dominated by a synthetic ‘plot’ as the condition of the possibility of narrative rationality (the Kantian element of the narrative construction), but also by an ongoing development of the plot, or a process of ‘emplotment’ (the Hegelian element). Historical description lends itself to a continual interpretation and reinterpretation of human action. That is why Ricoeur may be considered to be a ‘postHegelian Kantian.’23 David Pellauer glosses this expression: “there are structures that organize human experience, but they are to be understood to change over time and hence themselves to be marked by the historicity that characterizes hermeneutic consciousness and self-understanding” (Pellauer 1997, xviii). Thus, like Gadamer, Ricoeur too does not attempt to propose a meta-temporal or a trans-historical account of historical reality, as Hegel attempted to do in his systematic philosophy, by way of positing a historical metanarrative or ‘absolute plot.’

3. ‘Refiguration’ and ‘application’ For Gadamer, the moment of ‘application’ cannot be separated from ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding,’ in terms of the whole dynamics of the process of interpretation (Gadamer 1989, 307 ff.). Indeed, for him, the fruit of the interpretive process is the resultant increase in consciousness or being of the interpreter, as a consequence of engaging in dialogue with the text. In the realm of narrative hermeneutics, ‘refiguration’ (or mimesis3) has to do with the process of prudential deliberation between the imaginative variations that are inspired by a productive encounter with a narrative. Ricoeur clearly states, “this stage corresponds to what H.-G. Gadamer, in his philosophical hermeneutics, calls ‘application’” (Ricoeur 1984, 70). Ricoeur also links ‘refiguration’ with Gadamer’s 23 Ricoeur himself uses this term as a self-definition (Ricoeur 1974, 412 ff.). See Pamela Sue Anderson (1993, 21-32) for a fuller explanation of this term.

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thesis of the ‘fusion of horizons’ (Ricoeur 1984, 77).‘Refiguration’ takes place via a fusion between the horizon of the ‘configured’ narrative and the ‘prefigured’ horizon of the reader, or via a ‘fusion of horizons’ of one’s world of meaning with the world of meaning of a text or a narrative. Consciousness and activity gets ‘refigured’ or transformed as a result of a productive ‘reading’ of narratives. This is because a narrative has the power to open up new worlds or new possibilities of meaning and action, and to ‘refigure’ old worlds of meaning and action. A productive encounter with a narrative is thus an important condition of the possibility of the transformation of narrative consciousness. It is Ricoeur’s explicit mention of ‘refiguration’ as the correlate of ‘application’ that led me to search for similar concepts in Gadamer’s thought which could serve as suitable correlates to ‘prefiguration’ and ‘configuration.’ In contradistinction to Romantic hermeneutics, Gadamer and Ricoeur contend that the act of reading or participation in a creative work is not meant to arrive at the original intention of the author or his or her original affective state of consciousness when the work was composed.24 Rather, participation is in its own right another act of creation, based on the interrelationship that one has with the work of art itself. For Gadamer, this involves a participatory ‘play,’25 whereas for Ricoeur this involves ‘emplotment,’ or a temporal refiguring of a course of action. ‘Emplotment’ is manifested in the construction of narratives, by way of the creation of a synthetic plot that holds together elements that could have been held together by quite different means (at the level of ‘configuration’). But for Ricoeur, a ‘configuration’ also takes place via the act of reading, when the reader attempts to make sense of the plot, char24 See the section entitled, “The questionableness of romantic hermeneutics …” in Truth and Method (pp. 173 ff.) for Gadamer’s position with regard to this issue of the significance of arriving at the author’s intention in the process of interpretation. For Ricoeur’s analysis of this problem, see “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding” (Ricoeur 1981, 145-164), and “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text” (Ricoeur 1981, 197-221). In the second article, Ricoeur not only explains the major features of a text and how it differs from discourse, but even how actions or social phenomena may be considered to be texts. 25 Accordingly, for Gadamer, “Reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction, performance, and interpretation … Thus the reading of a book would still remain an event in which the content comes to presentation” (Gadamer 1989, 160-61).

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acters, theme, etc., being proposed in the narrative. Thus ‘emplotment’ takes place at different levels: at the level of the creative ‘configuration’ performed by the author of the historical or fictional narrative; at the level of ‘configuration’ performed by the reader of the narrative; and at the level of ‘refiguration’ performed as a result of a productive act of reading of the ‘configured’ text. Imaginative variations that come into play at the level of ‘refiguration’ enable one to posit and choose between different alternatives of human action that result from a productive reading of the narrative.26 In spite of his insistence on the need for explanatory moments in the process of interpretation, Ricoeur does not abandon the basic ontological dimension of ‘application,’ because a ‘refigured’ ‘seeing-as’ leads to a ‘refigured’ ‘being-as,’ on “the deepest ontological level” (Ricoeur 1984, xi). However, Ricoeur is not just concerned about the existential enhancement of ‘being’ brought about by such a ‘fusion of horizons,’ but with clearly more practical interests, and concomitantly, with clearly more critical and normative dimensions of human action. Gadamer’s concern about ‘truth and being’ or ‘tradition and being’ is reappropriated and enhanced by Ricoeur in terms of a more practically oriented ‘being and acting’ or ‘being and doing.’ Here too, this difference of hermeneutical concern between Gadamer and Ricoeur may be demonstrated in the way they understand ‘play’ in the process of ‘application,’ and ‘emplotment’ in the process of ‘refiguration,’ respectively. The choice of the term ‘emplotment’ itself reveals a far more serious concern for social and personal change on the part of Ricoeur than the word ‘play,’ chosen by Gadamer. That is why, for Ricoeur, the criteria employed in the process of ‘understanding’ and especially ‘application’ within narrative hermeneutics would necessarily have structural, critical and morally normative components. To begin with, the ‘refigured’ narrative needs to be subjected to structural investigation, before being personally ‘appropriated’ and applied in terms of the possibilities of human action which the text inspires. Without subjecting the creative work to a minimal moment of objective scrutiny (or ‘distanciation’), the chances for mis-interpretation and thus 26 Ricoeur deals with the issue of productive reading in the Chapter titled, “The World of the Text and the World of the Reader,” in Time and Narrative, Vol. 3. His presentation of this encounter between text and reader is influenced by a number of works on the theme of reader-response criticism, including Iser 1978, Ingarden 1973 and 1974.

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for mis-figuration or dis-figuration (of human action) are much more possible. While Gadamer is generally reputed to give priority to the claim that the text makes on the interpreter, in this sense (of providing for a necessary explanatory moment), it is Ricoeur who seems to take the text far more seriously. This moment of explanatory ‘distanciation’ would result in a more careful and studied scrutiny of the text in terms of historical-critical and structural methods of investigation. In terms of the appropriation of a text, Ricoeur’s dictum of ‘explain more in order to understand better’ can equally well be translated into a similar dictum of ‘explain and understand more in order to apply better.’ Secondly, for Ricoeur, any reading would need to take into account a critical analysis of the text. Gadamer is averse to such analysis. Rather, for him, a participatory reading of texts contributes to a project of a continual Bildung, or educational and cultural development. Gadamer advocates an engagement with classical texts, because of the perennial and substantive values such texts represent, thereby deepening the values of culture and tradition. Ricoeur would agree with the basic premise that if one is exposed to comparatively more sublime texts, this increases the likelihood of being well-directed in one’s practical life-world. However, unlike Gadamer, Ricoeur would maintain that any narrative should in principle be open to a critical assessment, allowing for a‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ so as to expose possibly unhealthy ideological elements within the text. These elements may be psychological (following the critique of Freud), economic (following the critique of Marx), or political (following the critique of Nietzsche)—the three figures that Ricoeur designates as the ‘masters of suspicion’ of critical hermeneutics. Gadamer rejects these attempts to explicitly explain texts in terms of critical inquiry, as for him texts may not be treated as objects to be analyzed but rather the repository of wisdom with which to dialogue. Of course, unlike the general trend within the field of critical hermeneutics, Ricoeur shares Gadamer’s interest in a ‘hermeneutics of retrieval,’ or a positive appropriation of the text. For the task of understanding cannot appropriately terminate with merely a hermeneutics of suspicion, which is only a means towards a deeper end of the interpretive process, viz., an appropriation that is at the level of ‘belonging’ rather than that of critical distanciation.27 27 There are a number of expressions in the literature which indicate a position contrary to the‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ viz.,‘the hermeneutics of disclosure,’ ‘the hermeneutics of retrieval,’ ‘the hermeneutics of trust,’ ‘the hermeneutics

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Thirdly, the appropriation of the narrative text needs to be governed by morally normative criteria. Following Heidegger, Gadamer does not seem to pay as much attention to—or at least does not systematically develop—distinctly moral dimensions within hermeneutical theory. While Ricoeur does not develop an explicitly moral dimension to narrative theory within Time and Narrative, he systematically devotes attention to moral concerns in Oneself as Another and From Text to Action, complementing teleological (ethical) normative criteria with necessary moments of deontological (moral) reflection that would help to govern interpretation and human action. For Ricoeur, the act of ‘refiguration’ shifts the locus of attention from the past to the future. This is in keeping with his general interest in the philosophy of the will and of human action, rather than merely a philosophy of the understanding. That is why he is not interested in a mere ‘fusion of horizons’ leading to a better understanding of a text or narrative, but instead in a ‘fission of narrative figurations’—to coin a new expression—resulting in the momentum to transform the world of human action by following through on one or more of the imagined figurations. A‘fusion of horizons’ is more in keeping with Gadamer’s strategy to reappropriate the past and its values, while a ‘fission of figurations’ would be more oriented towards transforming the world of action by introducing refined values into the world, based on morally normative criteria. In this regard, Ricoeur sees the reading of even historical texts as important from the normative and practical point of view, as such texts have a bearing on how we decide to act in the future. Unlike Gadamer who largely restricts himself to works of art as bearers of ‘truth,’ Ricoeur believes that poiesis is “a function of both revelation and transformation … one may say both that poiesis reveals structures which would have remained unrecognized without art, and that it transforms life, elevating it to another level” (Ricoeur 1991, 182). Following Heidegger, Gadamer stresses the revelatory function of a work of art. What is deficient in such a disposition towards texts is the transformative function, and in Habermasian terms, an emancipatory function of a work of art. Thus, a ‘refiguration’ of action would entail not just a ‘redescription’ of the narrative form of action, but a ‘represcription’ of values that undergird action. This ‘refiguration’ would take place not of affirmation,’ and ‘the hermeneutics of reenactment.’ According to Richard Kearney, e.g.,“the hermeneutics of affirmation emphasizes our desire to be open to an irreducible ‘surplus of meaning’ (surcroît de sens)” (Kearney 1998, 449, original italics).

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only in the act of understanding, but also, as a consequence, in personal and social action and personal and social narratives as well.

Conclusion Both Gadamer and Ricoeur view an encounter with narratives as a participatory and not an object-oriented or speculative activity. Whereas Aristotle adopts a largely psychological approach to participation in a tragic drama, Gadamer adopts a largely ontological approach to it, while Ricoeur adopts a largely practical approach not only to drama, but to narrative works in general. Where Ricoeur clearly takes the Gadamerian project to a new hermeneutical level is in working out a comprehensive analysis of mimesis that takes into account not just an existential manner of ‘being-in-the-world,’ but a dynamic, practical manner of ‘acting-inthe-world’ or ‘doing-in-the-world,’ subject to methodological, critical and morally normative considerations. We have seen that Ricoeur’s notion of‘prefiguration’ shares a number of features associated with Gadamer’s‘effective history,’ albeit in a narrative mode, and bereft of the constraints of a commitment to tradition-based prejudice as the condition of the possibility of knowledge. As regards ‘configuration,’ Ricoeur places far more emphasis than Gadamer on the dimensions of methodological ‘explanation,’ here applied to historical and fictional narratives. Finally, in the area of ‘application,’ Ricoeur takes structural, critical and morally normative criteria associated with practical action far more seriously than Gadamer, for the latter is more interested in existential appropriation as the fruit of interpretation. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory complements and advances the project of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in significant directions. By proposing that narratives are the framework through which we interpret human action, Ricoeur has taken hermeneutical theory to a new and practically relevant level. Coupled with this narrative dimension to hermeneutics, Ricoeur’s sympathetic approach towards methodological, critical and moral criteria serves to provide a nuanced, balanced and comprehensive understanding of contemporary hermeneutical theory.

Note I wish to thank Pol Vandevelde and Bradford Hinze for their guidance and valuable suggestions connected with an earlier work on narrative

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hermeneutics from which this essay has been constructed, viz., my doctoral dissertation (Marquette University, 2003).

Works cited Anderson, Pamela Sue. 1993. Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the Will. Atlanta: Scholars’ Press. Apel, Karl-Otto. 1997. “Regulative Ideas or Truth-Happening?: An Attempt to Answer the Question of the Conditions of the Possibility of Valid Understanding.” In The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn. Chicago: Open Court. Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle (2 Vols), ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1975. Truth and Method, trans.of second ed. (1965) by W. Glen-Doepel, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press. ———. 1976. “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection,” trans. G. B. Hess and R. E. Palmer. In Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1989. Truth and Method. 2nd revised ed., trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum Publishing Company. ———. 1997.“Reflections on my Philosophical Journey.” In The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn. Chicago: Open Court. Gorner, Paul. 2000. Twentieth Century German Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1977. “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” In Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Hahn, Lewis E, ed. 1995. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Chicago: Open Court. ———, ed. 1997. The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Chicago: Open Court. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row. How, Alan. 1995. The Habermas‑Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social. Brookfield: Avebury Press. Ingarden, Roman. 1973. Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth Olson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Ricoeur’s Narrative Hermeneutics & Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics 165 ———. 1974. The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature, trans.George Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jervolino, Domenico. 1996. “Gadamer and Ricoeur on the Hermeneutics of Praxis.” In Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. Richard Kearney. London: Sage Publications. Kearney, Richard, ed. 1996. Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action. London: Sage Publications. ———. 1998. “Ricoeur.” In Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pellauer, David. 1997. “Foreword: Recounting Narrative.” In Morny Joy, Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1973. “Ethics and Culture. Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue.” Philosophy Today 17: 153-65. ———. 1974. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B.Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1984. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1985. Time and Narrative. Vol. 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1991. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1992. Oneself as Another, trans. by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. “Paul Ricoeur: Intellectual Autobiography.” In The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis E. Hahn. Chicago: Open Court. Schweiker, William. 1990. Mimetic Reflections: A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology and Ethics. New York: Fordham University Press. Silverman, Hugh, ed. 1991. Gadamer and Hermeneutics. New York: Routledge.

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Teigas, Demetrius. 1995. Knowledge and Hermeneutic Understanding : A Study of the Habermas‑Gadamer Debate. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Wall, John, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, eds. 2002. Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. New York: Routledge. Warnke, Georgia. 1987. Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2002. “Hermeneutics, Ethics and Politics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Hayden. 1987. “The Metaphysics of Narrativity: Time and Symbol in Ricoeur’s Philosophy of History,” In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

7 The Question of (In)Tolerance in Heidegger’s Account of World-Disclosure Paul R. Gyllenhammer And if he were forcibly dragged up the steep and rugged ascent of the cave and not let go till he had been dragged out into the sunlight, would he not experience pain, and so struggle against this (Plato)? We experience at the same time how the liberator liberates. He does not liberate by conversing with the cave-dwellers in the language, and with the aims and intentions, of the cave, but by laying hold of them violently and dragging them away (Heidegger 2002, 62).

T

he possibility of liberation (Befreiung) is of paramount concern for Martin Heidegger. In his major work, Being and Time, Heidegger attempts to liberate us from the blindness of the Western metaphysical tradition by setting before us a genuine understanding of  Quotation as it appears in Heidegger’s 1931 lecture course on the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic (Heidegger 2002, 30).  References to Being and Time appear parenthetically as (Heidegger 1962), with the English edition page numbers followed by the German. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s translation is used throughout except where

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Being. Heidegger refers to this liberating project as fundamental ontology the beginning of which is an analysis of the human experience of the question of being (Seinsfrage). Humans question the meaning of existence because we are temporal and historical beings. As temporal beings, we are not only mortal but aware of our own mortality. Our attunement to death manifests itself in the general care (Sorge) we display for leading a meaningful life. As historical beings, we understand the limits which surround the choices we make in the pursuit of a purposeful life. In spite of historical limits, there is a common goal for all humans. Heidegger identifies this pursuit as the struggle for authentic resoluteness (eigentliche Entschlossenheit). I find a limit, however, in Heidegger’s analysis of this notion. Underdeveloped in his account is the role an interaction with a foreign way of life (Volksfremd) plays in the possibility of being authentic. I argue that an engagement with foreign ways of existing is a necessary condition for becoming aware of one’s own historical limits and, consequently, for being authentic in Heidegger’s sense. If this is the case, then tolerance—taken as the means for coping with otherness—can be seen as a fundamental virtue for accurately understanding and responding to the reality of our interpretive or hermeneutic nature. To uncover the idea of authentic resoluteness, an exploration into Heidegger’s account of world‑disclosure (Erschlossenheit von Welt) is necessary. World‑disclosure is closely connected to an awareness of contingency and carries with it the experience of being unsettled or uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). Being-unsettled is a turning point for Heidegger because it prepares the individual for authentic resoluteness: the reference is Heidegger 1996, which indicates the use of Joan Stambaugh’s translation.  Wolin appropriates the term Volksfremd from an ominous source: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Wolin’s point is to show that Heidegger is ultimately hostile toward the “intellectuals” who are alien to the spirit of true German culture (Wolin 1990, 95). I am using this term in a positive manner to show that the alien other is necessary for authentic action, which, in turn, requires a tolerance of the other’s difference from our world.  Heidegger describes the ontological mood of Anxiety as the experience of uncanniness. I derive the notion of contingency—a term cautiously used in Being and Time (Heidegger 1962, 183/143)–from this fundamental experience of uncanniness.

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the resolve, in the face of contingency, to choose among the possibilities handed down from one’s heritage (Erbe). Again, I argue that the very awareness of the hermeneutic situation is made possible by an interaction with foreign ways of life and, so, requires the virtue of tolerance. Without tolerance, we may never hear the significance of otherness as a mode of disclosure of our own historical limits. Tolerance liberates us to the truth of existence.

The World Heidegger’s central concern, in Being and Time, is to account for the meaning of fundamental ontology. A key insight he draws upon is the failure of the Western metaphysical tradition to inquire into the question of the meaning of Being. Since humans are the ones who question being, an appropriate methodological starting point for doing ontology is with an analysis of human being. Heidegger enters, then, the Analytic of Dasein. Analogous to Immanuel Kant, Heidegger endeavors to uncover the structural conditions which account for the meaning of existence. Unlike Kant, Heidegger does not question into the mind’s structure for such an approach presupposes an artificial subject-object duality. Heidegger uncovers a structure which is more primordial than the structure of the mind: Being‑in‑the‑world (In-der-Welt-sein). Heidegger’s structure of being reveals what Kant’s does not, namely, why humans care about meaning at all. As Being-in (In-Sein), human existence is grounded in the following notions: attunement, understanding, discourse, and falling (Befindlichkeit, Verstehen, Rede, and Verfallen, respectively). Given the complexity of Heidegger’s analysis, each notion will be briefly discussed at an appropriate point below. For my purposes, the issue of the world (Welt) will take center stage. Heidegger lays out four possible meanings of the word world in section fourteen of Being and Time. Each meaning points to the next in terms of a more fundamental ground.“World,” in the first sense,“is used as an ontical concept, and signifies the totality of those entities which can be present-at-hand within the world” (Heidegger 1962, 93/64). In Heidegger’s terminology, something is present-at-hand (vorhanden) when it is taken as a discrete entity abstracted from its context of involvement. To say that the world is the unity of discrete entities is simply to think of the world as being made up of the actual number of existing things.

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The limit to this account is twofold. First, as an abstract way of dealing with things, we bracket the meaningful contexts in which things exist. Second, and following from the first, this account overlooks the ontological difference between things and world. Heidegger’s philosophy is rooted in this ontological difference. The world is not the entities themselves but that which contains a unity of things. Thus, the second meaning of the term: “‘World’ functions as an ontological term, and signifies the Being of those entities which we have just mentioned. And indeed ‘world’ can become a term for any realm which encompasses a multiplicity of entities” (Heidegger 1962, 93/64). The being of entities is synonymous with world insofar as the world refers to the regional ontologies within which entities are gathered, for example, mathematics, physics, anthropology, psychology, etc. At this level, we have a less abstract and more meaningful account of world/being given this level of categorization. Entities have meaning through a context. There is, nevertheless, a shortsightedness to this more appropriate account of world. Heidegger develops a deeper sense of world from out of the ontic-ontological or thing-region distinction. What is lacking in the prior two notions of world is reference to Dasein (human being). The ontic-ontological distinction remains abstract as long as Dasein is not developed into the account. So, in accordance with fundamental ontology, we have to consider a world as that wherein Dasein exists. In this case, world refers to a practice to which and within which individuals belong and live (Dreyfus 1994; Heidegger 1962, 93/65). A practice is set apart from other practices by a distinct set of concerns and, of course, the things, instruments, and tools used in meeting those concerns. Worlds are ontic-existentiell at this practical level because each depicts a real, historically established totality of equipment (Zeugganzes) which circumscribes and gives coherence to an individual’s action. Heidegger describes human engagement with a practice as a totality of involvement (Bewandtnisganzheit) where such involvement is understood by the one who actually belongs to the practice in question (Heidegger 1962, 116–18/84–6). Heidegger emphasizes the existential understanding or personal belonging to a practice as means to distinguish this notion of world from the former two. People are the conduits of a world because their actions bring to life this way of being. Through our actual involvement with things, we have the most intimate understanding of a thing’s world.

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The final sense of world relates to an ontological-existential insight. World, in this instance, can be understood in a structural or transcendental manner. As Heidegger explains, this more general awareness of world occurs when the individual recognizes his or her contingent relationship to all ontic-existentiell worlds. At such a moment the“world as world” discloses itself (Heidegger 1962, 232/187). Our access to the ontological-existential sense of world is, oddly enough, through a breakdown of our meaningful relation to a practice. Heidegger describes two distinct levels of such a breakdown. The first level triggers a grasp of the world as a specific region or practice within which I live. The second level of meaning-breakdown triggers a genuine insight into the ontological-existential meaning of world. The world is most meaningful to us when we are harmoniously engaged in a project. Like a master bicycle mechanic, who is intently slipping spokes through the holes of a hub and lacing them together onto a rim, the practice of bicycle maintenance is her ground for being-in-the-world. The entities which surround her take on meaning through this context of engagement. But no practice goes undisturbed. Heidegger discusses the privation of harmony in moments of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy (Heidegger 1962, 102-7/72-6). Take the phenomenon of obtrusiveness as an example. Something is obtrusive, in Heidegger’s sense, when an object is noticeably missing for the project at hand. Imagine then, our bicycle mechanic, who is building a wheel, reaching for a spoke wrench but time and again grabs the wrong tool for the job. Each wrong tool is thrown back onto the bench in frustration. Each wrong tool stands in the way of, i.e., is obtrusive to, completing the project at hand. Now, one of the critical points Heidegger makes about such momentary breakdowns of harmony is that these ruptures allow room for reflection about the world in question. The ontic-existentiell world of involvement is potentially disclosed to someone in moments of disharmony because one’s prior involvement with the world is broken. The breakdown of meaningful engagement with the world is a necessary condition for gaining a reflective apprehension of one’s involvement with a world. Moreover, an individual’s involvement in a world is the ground for any and all reflection about what matters to the person. Although the ontic-existentiell world of involvement is disclosed through momentary breakdowns of harmony, we cannot conclude that the person understands the true significance of world-disclosure. In fact,

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when the harmony of my world is broken by something obtrusive, since I am so concerned with the project at hand, I remain focused on that task. How, then, do we gain an understanding of the structural difference between the ontic-existentiell and ontological-existential notions of world? Such an understanding becomes available, Heidegger explains, in those strange moments when a person feels totally disconnected or not-at-home (Unheimlich) in the task at hand. Humans have the capacity, in other words, to sense that their world, or actual practice, is not binding. The individual senses that she is not essentially tied to a particular way of life. This disconcerting attitude is brought about by the mood of anxiety (Angst). Anxiety is the source of the second-level breakdown of meaningful engagement with the world. Within the Analytic of Dasein, anxiety is the fundamental mood which discloses to someone the reality of what it means to be human. By understanding anxiety, we become attuned to the very essence of human existence. And that essence is, for Heidegger, finitude. By finitude, Heidegger means more than just the fact that we are going to die. Humans are also limited in what they can do. As finite, we are limited in being, knowledge, and ability. Anxiety is a result of our intimate awareness of all three of these dimensions of finitude. Although I take issue with the power of anxiety later in the paper, for now I will focus on the least controversial dimension of finitude: the link between anxiety and death. Anxiety is the mood which takes us over and draws us out of our intimate involvement with the world. Moments of anxiety re-awaken us to the fundamental truth of our finite or mortal being. Thus, we are reminded of our being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode). Far from being a negative experience, Heidegger sees such a reawakening to death as the very source of passion one has for life. We can see the awareness of death as a productive paradox: death is the most intimate of all certainties in life, and my awareness of it makes me concerned about being-in-the-world; however, the reality of death, although it brings about my meaningful orientation in the world, cannot be a reality of mine. The reality of my death is, Heidegger says, my “ownmost nonrelational possibility” (Heidegger 1962, 294/250). By calling death a non-relational possibility, Heidegger highlights the alterity in this most certain of future events. It is an approaching possibility or reality but one which will extinguish all reality and possibilities for me. My death is an enigma. I cannot even imagine my own not-being since each scenario

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has me as the ultimate perceiver. The alterity of death draws me out of my harmonious involvements with the world. When anxiety/death extracts me from out of the world, I reflect about my world in a way radically different from the way I do when something obtrusive stands in the way. Through anxiety, someone asks the big question about the meaning of life, e.g., “Is this really how I should be spending my time?” Anxiety reveals, then, a primordial kind of responsibility in that life demands a response to do something before it all ends. Here, we are on the threshold of understanding the ontological-existential meaning of world. When I recognize the freedom implicit in choosing to continue a way of life, I, thereby, recognize the fluidity of my own self and the world. Anxiety reveals, in other words, the intimate bond which exists between self and world insofar as they are not permanent things. Who should I be? To what world should I be committed? These are angst driven questions which reveal the world as a totality of involvement as well as the self as bound to such a world. What is most important for my analysis is Heidegger’s insistence that humans can understand the structure of being-in-the-world. In this case, we start to see that I am bound to a context or a world of possible engagement. Recognizing that I must be in a world is a structural awareness of being human. There are no autonomously thinking subjects because humans are always understanding and acting with the support of established practices (Heidegger 1962, 344/298). I am nothing without an actual world of possible engagement. “In this, Dasein is taken all the way back to its naked uncanniness (nackte Unheimlichkeit), and becomes fascinated by it. This fascination... takes Dasein back from its ‘worldly’ possibilities” (Heidegger 1962, 394/344). Although anxiety dislodges us from the meaningfulness of our world, we recognize our intimate belonging to the world because it exposes the nullity of ourselves without the world. This is a fundamental insight into being human and as such it is an ontological insight. The individual grasps simultaneously these features of human existence: 1) the contingency of myself (death), 2) the necessity of being in a world (the nothingness  Stressing this dimension of self-nothingness, Heidegger says, “(T)here is ontologically a gap (Kluft) separating the selfsameness of the... Self from the identity of that ‘I’ which maintains itself throughout its manifold Experiences” (Heidegger 1962, 168/130). And again: “Anxiety discloses an insignificance of the world; and this insignificance reveals the nullity of that with which one can concern oneself ” (Heidegger 1962, 393/343).

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of the self without a world), and 3) the contingency of the world (the nothingness of the world without human action). Grasping the structure self-world is the experience of what Heidegger calls formal indication: a living experience of a structure of human-being. Heidegger refers to the fundamental structures of human being as formal indicatives (formale Anzeige), highlighting the fact that these structures can only be accessed by each Dasein in a moment of personal appropriation (Heidegger 1962, 362/315). In the next section, Heidegger’s account of authentic resoluteness is introduced. Before we proceed, I would like to highlight a problem. We have just explained that anxiety reveals to me my own contingency as well as my intimate connection to the world. Anxiety also reveals the world’s contingency. Heidegger, I argue, does not offer enough insight into how this level of disclosure occurs. It will be shown that an awareness of historical contingency requires another triggering-event, e.g., a stranger to my world.

Authentic Historicity

The significance of the notion world is further developed when the ideas of authenticity and choice are developed. The question of authenticity is a hotly debated topic in Heidegger scholarship. On the one hand, there are those, such as Richard Wolin, who understand the issue of authenticity to be caught within an egocentric and/or decisionist account of human agency (Wolin 1990). On the other hand, there are those, such as Lawrence Vogel, who understand authenticity to be anything but egocentric and certainly more than mere decisionism (Vogel 1994). Contrary to the self-centered account, Vogel has the correct insight regarding the inherently social aspect of authenticity. And for the question of choice, the problem of decisionism is overcome by developing, beyond what Heidegger actually says, a social obligation regarding tolerance, which is implicit in Heidegger’s account of authenticity. I now turn to the issue of authenticity in order to show its underlying social dimension. The problem of decisionism will be taken up in a later section. A vast proportion of life is spent involved with the world(s) of daily concerns. When we are wrapped up in such concerns we are existing in an inauthentic (uneigentlich) mode. As inauthentic, we live as fallen among things and people within the world. Any course of action I take

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is not unique because the same practices circumscribe everyone’s daily routines. As inauthentic, I exist as a one among the many (das Man). Within this fallen state of being, although we have a circumspective (Umsicht) grasp of the concerns which govern our attention, we do not distance ourselves from such concerns to an extreme degree. Because of this lack of reflective distance, our capacity to choose is affected. Employing the term expectation (Erwarten), Heidegger describes what choice is like when we are tied so closely to the world. Expectation is not just an occasional looking-away from the possible to its possible actualization, but is essentially a waiting for that actualization. Even in expecting, one leaps away from the possible and gets a foothold in the actual. It is for its actuality that what is expected is expected. By the very nature of expecting, the possible is drawn into the actual, arising out of the actual and returning to it (Heidegger 1962, 306/262).

Expectation can be understood as the kind of awareness that anyone uncritically bound by context or factual circumstances may experience. People certainly choose what to do while existing inauthentically, that is, while consumed with the project at hand, but the possible future is actually quite routine and unquestioned. Expectation is correlated to a closed future insofar as what is possible is subsumed under the comforting grasp of the actual realization of the future. Although Heidegger describes this level of pre-reflective involvement with one’s surroundings as inauthentic we need not take this in a pejorative manner. In fact, Heidegger repeatedly claims that our state of fallenness is a descriptive, not an evaluative, mode of being. Indeed, human understanding (Verstehen) can only be grasped if we read this pre-reflective mode of being-in the world as ultimately positive. As the German word suggests, uneigentlich means to be not in possession of oneself; and this can simply point to the fact that we become consumed by our involvements in the world. When I am engaged in the world I am not reflectively aware of my own self as distinct from the things with which, and people with whom, I am interacting. The inauthentic mode of existing cannot be overcome in any ultimate sense for it is an existential-ontological structure of being-in-the-world. Anxiety, as previously explained, draws us out of this pre-reflective state and delivers us over to a new kind of choosing. In such instances, a person opens up to the possibility for being authentic. Heidegger

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accounts for this level of choosing by employing the term anticipation (Vorlaufen): (B)y anticipation... one is liberated from one’s lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities (Heidegger 1962, 308/264).

When Heidegger speaks of anticipation, he points to the openness of the future given that the possible has been grasped by the concerned individual. Authentic choice relates to the kind of awareness which accompanies a critical grasp of a possible, i.e., open future. However, as Taylor Carman discusses, authenticity comes about not only from an awareness of the openness of a possible future; it arises from an awareness of the closing down of possibilities as well. When I choose, the possibilities available to me are limited by my past and present. Thus, I cannot do anything that is logically possible; rather, I am existentially limited. Furthermore, any step I take in the future will ultimately close off other real-world possibilities for me. The individual is, then, acutely aware of death in the choices made. We are death, in a certain sense, insofar as possibilities are constantly unavailable to and dying away from us (Carman 2003, 276-91). Authentic choice relates to the person’s awareness that a world of practical engagement is a play of possibility/impossibility. Because of this, as stated previously, a sense of responsibility hangs over one’s head regarding what choices are made. When someone becomes liberated from the chains of seeing the world as static (or expected), one is, thereby, opened to the personal freedom and responsibility inherent in the way life unfolds. As authentic, one rises above one’s own fallen self (Man-selbst) and encounters an intimate, first-person awareness of one’s involvement in the world. At this point, we can easily misunderstand Heidegger’s account of authenticity. There is no doubt that the issue of being-authentic is a  Cf. Heidegger 2002, 43-44. Heidegger, following Nietzsche, has an inverted Platonism since a static vision of reality is ultimately an illusion.  Carman explains the distinction between the first-person intimacy of authenticity and the mediate understanding of oneself as anyone (Carman 2003, 292 ff.). Arguing for the importance of a first-person responsibility in no way commits Heidegger to a theory of the autonomous subject.

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matter of taking hold of oneself in contradistinction from just going along with the flow of the they. Authenticity is a liberation from my unreflective participation in the world. This does not necessarily indicate Heidegger’s slide into an egocentric position, however. Even though he does describe the mode of inauthenticity as a state of self-alienation (Heidegger 1962, 164 ff./126 ff.), Heidegger’s notion of authenticity cannot be reduced to a me against society type thesis. Heidegger certainly emphasizes the fact that the I or individuality is retrieved in moments of authenticity; however, this is in no way an endorsement of a retrieval of a purely independent and autonomous subject. We need only to recall what was said above about anxiety to understand why. Anxiety brings us face to face with the realities of 1) death and 2) the nullity of the I independent of the world. In reference to the latter, Heidegger says, “In clarifying Being-in-the-world we have shown that a bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally, nor is it ever given” (Heidegger 1962, 152/116). Heidegger recognizes, therefore, an intimate bond between the culturally established world and the self. Heidegger is clear that Division II of Being and Time deepens the analyses given in Division I. There should be no question, then, that the individualist tendencies found in Division I, where there is a heightened sense of a person’s fight to distance herself from the rest of society, is modified by the analysis of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit). Within Division II, Heidegger explains that authentic choice is always tied up with one’s historical community. We always choose from among those possibilities handed down to us from our heritage (Erbe). Heidegger goes so far as to discuss one’s fate (Schicksal) and communal destiny (Geschick) given these historical limitations. Authentic choice is a matter of repetition (Wiederholung):“In repetition, fateful destiny can be disclosed explicitly as bound up with the heritage which has come down to us” (Heidegger 1962, 438/386).  Heidegger totally avoids the egocentric problem insofar as this relates to the issue of how the mind knows external reality. The egocentric problem, if there is one for Heidegger, is often related to a latent Kierkegaardianism detected in his notion of authenticity (Wolin 1990; Dreyfus 1994; Carman 2003).  Wolin reads Heidegger here as inconsistent or at odds with himself regarding the question of authenticity (Wolin 1990, 63). Vogel, in turn, divides his book into the existentialist, historicist, and cosmopolitan readings of Heidegger (Vogel 1994).

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Fate and destiny are seemingly odd word choices given the emphasis Heidegger places on the openness of the future. He obviously wants us to take the notions of fate and individual responsibility as complementary notions. How can this be done? Heidegger’s sense of authenticity occurs within the horizon of a history, tradition, or heritage. Insofar as authenticity is the choice of an individual, however, it is more than just a renewal of a preestablished way of life. Heidegger emphasizes that refiguring the past into one’s own is essential to being authentic.10 Although our actions may be influenced by our hero (Heidegger 1962, 437/385), the path we assemble can be uniquely ours. The future is open, even if set on a course through the past, because Dasein can retrieve past possibilities unexplored by others. What someone assembles in her own practical comprehension of the world is certainly handed down from the past; yet, the individual can always assemble things in a new way. There can be, then, moments of discovery by individuals, e.g., Newton’s laws of motion, within a distinct history of inquiry. Such individuals are rightly praised for their accomplishments even if their insights are not the product of sheer genius. Heidegger’s way of balancing fate and individual responsibility helps us avoid hypostatizing the existence of world/being. We must always remember that a world–no matter how much influence it has over us–does not exist in the way a thing does. There is an ontological difference between the world and thing. Worlds are maintained (or changed) only through the acts of people, whereas things exist independently of any such acts.11 The world and, hence, meaning are fluid in a way things are not. Any world risks disappearing through a lack of participation and, so, the individual is responsible for how and what meanings are maintained. Heidegger is, of course, not content with establishing the mere fluidity of a world. Our heritage adds a kind of ground to this openness. Heidegger even seems to indicate an interest in establishing and maintaining a particular kind of world. In other words, Heidegger offers a 10 Joan Stambaugh notes, in her “Translator’s Introduction” to Being and Time, that a possible translation of the term Wiederholung is recapitulation “since that word is used in music to refer to what Heidegger seems to intend by Wiederholung. In music... recapitulation refers to the return of the initial theme after the whole development section. Because of its new place in the piece, that same theme is now heard differently” (Heidegger 1996, xv-xvi). 11 See Carman’s notion of ontic realism (Carman 2003, 155-203).

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vision of society which is itself authentic. An authentic society would be established around the bond which exists between people through their awareness of their historical destiny. Heidegger says, (I)f fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with Others, its historizing (Geschehen) is a co-historizing (Mitgeschehen) and is determinative for it as destiny (Geschick). This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people. Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities (Heidegger 1962, 436/384).

Authenticity is, ultimately, based around a bond between people. As Heidegger implies in this passage, although this bond already exists between people, it is not necessarily recognized. With this in mind, I propose a distinct way of understanding personal responsibility in Being and Time. I suggest the authentic individual has a specific mission, viz., to help others understand the destiny of the community. The individual must become the voice of a community. From this perspective, the political dimension of Being and Time can be seen to have a rather specific goal. If this is the case, then the charge that Heidegger is caught within a form of decisionism is unwarranted. Let us now look into this charge.

Becoming an Other’s Conscience Authentic choice derives from an understanding of the human condition, particularly, one’s responsibility for maintaining a world. Here, we can say that authenticity relates to the attitude one has toward how one acts in the world. However, insofar as authentic choice is guided by a certain (gewiss) understanding of the original truth of existence (die ursprüngliche Wahrheit der Existenz), what one does may be prescribed by fundamental ontology as well. Before we look into what this determinate content might be, we have to discuss the truth disclosed by Heidegger’s inquiry. Following Hubert Dreyfus, the basic truth exposed by fundamental ontology is the truth of hermeneutic realism (Dreyfus 1994, 253). Her-

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meneutic realism is a position which derives from Heidegger’s awareness that any situation (Heidegger 1962, 346/299) within which one must choose is itself a mere one among many possible, existentially real worlds. The second and third senses of world, discussed in the first part of this paper, actually expose this reality because they show that, at any given time, a plurality of worlds are actually available to me. Thus, any world I may currently inhabit is but one possible horizon of understanding. Anxiety reveals this contingency to me insofar as I can choose to stop participating in a world in an attempt to change the meaning of my life. The hermeneutic part of this way of thinking is simply an expression of an acknowledged pluralism. My world is just one interpretive nexus of meaning. The realistic aspect comes in because, when we recognize the plurality of worlds, we are also aware of the independence of things from our world. Since there are different ways of interpreting things, we know that our world–as an interpretive nexus of meaning–does not, once and for all, constitute the meaning of a thing. However successful this claim to realism may be is beside the point of this paper.12 Whether Heidegger’s pluralism is best described as idealist, realist, or something in between is not particularly relevant for me at this time. What is significant is that our first real contact with the issue of tolerance arises with this truthful insight into pluralism. Thus, an essential part of being-authentic is to recognize the fact that any choice “cannot become rigid as regards the Situation” (Heidegger 1962, 355/307). The individual who makes a choice must respect the contingency implicit in the choice made. Any path that is taken has its rationale “in terms of the heritage” which the individual “takes over” (Heidegger 1962, 435/383). So, Carman states, even if living authentically means living for the sake of some particular thing, “(w)hat sort of thing that might be... can in no way be anticipated or prescribed by fundamental ontology. There is simply nothing to say a priori about what kinds of things are worthy of our wholehearted devotion” (Carman 2003, 296 fn. 34).13 Hermeneutic realism, we might say, exposes 12 Carman provides an interesting critique of many attempts to prove realism (Carman 2003, 183-90). 13 In light of what Carman says, consider the following statements by Heidegger: “The Situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like something present-at-hand which is waiting for someone to grasp it” (Heidegger 1962, 355/307); “If everything ‘good’ is a heritage, and the character of ‘goodness’ lies

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the true lack of any a priori grounds for taking an interest in something. We could also conclude, as Carman implies, and Wolin clearly argues, that fundamental ontology leaves us with a mere decisionism. Wolin describes the problem: (W)hat might be described as the normative impoverishment of the Heideggerian category of “resolve” or “decisiveness” goes far toward explaining the failings of decisionism in all its forms. For when it is devoid of any and every normative orientation, “decision” can only be blind and uninformed—ultimately, it becomes a leap into the void. Without a material criterion for decision, it becomes impossible to distinguish an authentic from an inauthentic decision, responsible from irresponsible action–let alone on what grounds an individual would even prefer one course of action to another (Wolin 1990, 52).14

Wolin’s point is compelling. The truth of pluralism could lead one to conclude that any way of life is as good as the next insofar as an individual’s resolve to maintain a particular world is not supported by a priori principles. Certainly, Heidegger does not provide us with a material criterion for either governing our actions or as a norm for judging all cultures. Indeed, all moral principles are worldly, historically based, and not necessary to the being of a person. So, without a normative principle, the notion of authenticity only tells someone how to act but not what one should do. Heidegger even says that fundamental ontology reveals the truth of existence without “holding up to Dasein an ideal of existence with any special ‘content’, or forcing any such ideal upon it ‘from outside’” (Heidegger 1962, 311/266). Is this the ultimate message Heidegger is offering through his inquiry? Is he trying to let us know that there are no a priori grounds for any action; thus, all we can do is go along with what history alone has conditioned us to respect? This is a plausible way of interpreting the notion of authentic resoluteness as guided by a sense of fate. Wolin goes so far as to charge Heidegger with supporting a vicious kind of opportunism, which allows people in making authentic existence possible, then the handing down of a heritage constitutes itself in resoluteness” (Heidegger 1962, 435/383). 14 Similarly, Dreyfus describes the difference between inauthenticity and authenticity as a gestalt shift (Dreyfus 1994, 317). Dreyfus concludes that “there can be no meaningful differences among projects, and that therefore we must base the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity on the form or style of activity only, not upon its content” (Dreyfus 1994, 328).

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to go along with any kind of action a context may offer (Wolin 1990, 65). I suggest that Heidegger leaves the door open for a more principled kind of action. When we develop Heidegger’s philosophy beyond what he explicitly says, there is a way beyond the problem.15 In particular, I want to look into his claim that an authentic person can help others become liberated. Then, in the following section, I discuss the limit to Heidegger’s account of historical-disclosure. Once these issues are addressed, it can be shown that Heidegger’s philosophy allows room for a kind of a priori obligation which derives from the truth disclosed by fundamental ontology. Without denying Heidegger’s understanding of pluralism, and the problem of decisionism which it introduces, I emphasize again the importance of truth in his philosophy. Although our choices are always based within a hermeneutic circle, our accurate understanding of this situation leads us to a positive appropriation of a world. In a rather famous passage, Heidegger says, In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves (Heidegger 1962, 195/153; emphasis added).

Heidegger is offering an important insight regarding authentic choice. We have a capacity to disclose a “primordial kind of knowing” which will liberate us from “popular conceptions” and “fancies”. This is our “first, last, and constant task” as humans. On the one hand, Heidegger is asking us to be attentive to the temporal-historical ground of human being. Part of this understanding will be a recognition of our deep belonging to a heritage and, thereby, a communal sense of destiny. Wolin is rightly concerned with the problem of decisionism given the absence of a concrete criterion alongside the emphasis on destiny and fate. 15 Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Vogel’s argument lies in his ability to work out a moral standpoint from the truths disclosed by Heidegger’s analysis (Vogel 1994, 88-102).

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On the other hand, Heidegger speaks of a task and, so, intends something more than just a mere readjustment of our attitude. Heidegger can be taken as expressing a political vision which draws an individual back into the world through this primordial kind of knowing. If this is the case, then Heidegger is advocating not just how one’s attitude toward life should be but what one should do with the insights gained from grasping the reality of being human. According to the passage above, we have the responsibility to make sure that the world we maintain is worthy of being handed down to others. We must ensure, in other words, that the tradition which will be inherited by others is in league with the things themselves.16 One’s choice is not, therefore, merely based upon an arbitrary or unfounded decision. The truth of existence is known with certainty (Gewissheit) for Heidegger. It is this insight which provides the passion for continuing with a particular world of meaningful engagement. More importantly, if one’s tradition is not unified around a genuine understanding of human being, then there is a personal responsibility to begin such an awakening. Heidegger suggests this line of social transformation ever so briefly in Being and Time. If we go back into the issue of inauthenticity, we can see just how far Heidegger supports this level of social transformation. Being-inauthentic means to live life within the confines of expectation. We are lost in the they insofar as we are consumed by our circumspective concerns. Living inauthentically can be so all consuming, however, that an individual, indeed, an entire culture, can spend the whole of life absorbed in this way of being.17 Heidegger expresses this extreme level of blindness to the truth throughout the text. He speaks of the dictatorship (Diktatur) of the they (164/126) and of the dominance (Herrschaft) of the public way in which things have been interpreted (213/169). One can be so totally seduced (Verführt) by the public account of things that “(t)he‘they’ prescribes one’s state-of-mind and determines what and how one ‘sees’” (Heidegger 1962, 213/170; emphasis added). 16 This sense of legitimacy/illegitimacy follows Heidegger into his later concern with our treatment of the earth as a standing-reserve (Heidegger 1977, 299). 17 For instance, Heidegger says that a true grasp of anxiety is rare: “Even rarer than the existentiell Fact of ‘real’ anxiety are attempts to interpret this phenomenon according to the principles of its existential-ontological Constitution and function. The reasons for this lie partly in the general neglect of the existential analytic of Dasein” (Heidegger 1962, 234-5/190).

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Heidegger is describing a level of inauthenticity which is a radical kind of alienation (Entfremdung) from the reality of existence (Heidegger 1962, 222/178). It appears, then, that, like the lotus eaters in the Odyssey, Heidegger sees a possible situation in which almost everyone is incapable of gaining an authentic understanding of the world.18 Here, Wolin sees an implicit elitism in Heidegger’s analysis of authenticity and, consequently, political action:“The de facto separation of human natures into authentic and inauthentic is radically undemocratic. The political philosophy that corresponds to this ontological dualism suggests that human beings are divided by nature into leaders and followers” (Wolin 1990, 56). I do not think Heidegger would support this claim. Heidegger clearly recognizes that there is no natural aptitude for understanding fundamental ontology. Fundamental ontology springs from out of a history of inquiry prior to which there was no such comprehension. Similar to the cave allegory which began this paper, even the liberator was once shown the truth of existence (cf. Heidegger 1962, 162/125). But who shows the liberator the truth? Heidegger’s answer here is anything but clear. Because Heidegger never clearly works through this question, Wolin’s charge of elitism cannot be easily countered. I will let this question lay idle for the moment. Wolin’s charge of elitism includes the point that Heidegger’s notion of authenticity contains an evaluative component. Some people are better off than others. There is, then, a dimension to being-inauthentic which is distinct from the merely descriptive aspect of falling into a practice. Given this evaluative tone, a moral goal is part of what it means to be authentic. In other words, contrary to Wolin’s argument regarding decisionism, a specific what is implied in Heidegger’s account of fundamental ontology.19 And that specific content is partly revealed by Heidegger’s own account of authentically being-with-others. When Heidegger states that Dasein “can become the ‘conscience’ of Others” (Heidegger 1962, 18 In the lectures on technology, Heidegger discusses the issue of enframing, where the world-historical frame of the technological paradigm comes to dominate the whole of our thinking. Heidegger’s concern with poetry is an attempt to bring to our awareness a perspective distinct from the technological frame (Heidegger 1977). 19 Even if Wolin’s argument is correct, and Heidegger is an opportunist, there is still a moral message being advocated through fundamental ontology. I think there is a different moral message, however.

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344/298),20 we see a specific moral goal implied in a person’s grasp of the truth. First, we need to say something about Heidegger’s notion of conscience (Gewissen).21 The notion of conscience is crucial to understanding the basis, and I would claim limit, of Heidegger’s account of fundamental ontology. The call (Ruf) of conscience is a passive experience of being lifted out of the first level of inauthenticity (Heidegger 1962, 320/275; 322/277). It is a passive experience in that it happens to an individual through an attunement to the reality of one’s own finite existence. “The call comes from me and yet from beyond and over me” (Heidegger 1962, 320/275). The experience of conscience is a kind of internal awakening to the reality of finitude, which does not allow me to remain blind to the limited time and responsibility I have for the meaning of existence. I cannot simply rest comfortably within the harmony of the world given the limited time there is to accomplish certain tasks in my life. The call of conscience is “unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien (fremde) voice.” Thus, Heidegger rhetorically asks:“What could be more alien to the ‘they’, lost in the manifold ‘world’ of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown into the ‘nothing’?” (Heidegger 1962, 321-322/277). Conscience is the anxious state whereby I am open to my own existential-historical limits. We cannot overstress the importance of conscience within Heidegger’s analysis. Conscience is the phenomenon which draws me out of my state of inauthenticity and provides me with the necessary space for understanding the truth of existence. It creates the gap (Kluft) between me, as a they-self, and myself as an authentic individual (Heidegger 1962, 168/130). Now, insofar as conscience comes from me it is an auto-affection; however, it is also described as an alien power and, so, is something other (hetero) than me. Is Wolin correct, then, in his assessment of a duality of people for Heidegger? Are some people simply attuned to hear the true significance of conscience/anxiety and others not? Heidegger never answers these questions. There is a further problem. 20 I acknowledge the fact that Heidegger says Dasein can and not should become the conscience of others. Wolin interprets this statement as evidence of Heidegger’s elitist political philosophy (Wolin 1990, 56). 21 The similarity between the German terms certainty (Gewissheit) and conscience (Gewissen) should be pointed out.

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Since conscience comes from me, we have to wonder how Dasein can become the conscience of others. Heidegger describes the difficulty: “(T)he call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world” (Heidegger 1962, 320/275). “The call... calls without uttering anything. The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent. And it does this only because, in calling the one to whom the appeal is made, it does not call him into the public idle talk of the ‘they’, but calls him back from this into the reticence of his existent potentialityfor-Being” (Heidegger 1962, 322/277). If conscience is a silent appeal, and the public idle talk of the they is ineffective, what means are at the liberator’s disposal to open the other to the call of conscience? Heidegger does not explain how this productive interaction between people takes place and, so, leaves us wondering to what extent conscience is a power some people have over others. Despite these limits, Heidegger does tell us that Dasein can be authentically solicitous or caring (Fürsorge) toward others by leaping forth to help liberate them (Heidegger 1962, 344/298).22 Here, Dasein is not taking over some project for someone else; rather, Dasein assists in opening the other to the existential-ontological structures that indicate the essence of being human. Heidegger says, “This kind of solicitude pertains essentially to authentic care–that is, to the existence of the Other, not to a ‘what’ with which he is concerned; it helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it” (Heidegger 1962, 159/122). Heidegger clearly supports the evaluative position that some ways of life are impoverished (Heidegger 1962, 68/43; 220-1/176). More importantly, when he puts forth the idea that Dasein can help others out of their lostness in the they, it appears that authenticity does prescribe a path for us to follow, namely, a concernful interaction with others about the reality of Dasein and the world.23 This is what an authentic person should do with the insights gained from fundamental ontology. 22 Heidegger distinguishes between two ways of dealing with the Other: leaping in (einspringen) and leaping forth (vorspringen). The former is unproductive insofar as the goal is to open the other to the Existential-Analytic of Dasein (Heidegger 1962, 158/122). That is, leaping in keeps the other person alienated from the reality of Dasein by dominating and making the other dependent on me for help. 23 Vogel provides an insightful discussion on the limits of the ethical relation between people suggested in Heidegger’s notion of leaping forth. The obliga-

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I extend this insight beyond the interpersonal level. The fundamental goal of being authentically engaged with the other is to bring about an authentic community. From this perspective, consider what Heidegger means when he says that “(i)n communication (Mitteilung) and in battle (Kampf) the power of destiny first becomes free. The fateful destiny of Dasein in and with its ‘generation’ constitutes the complete, authentic occurrence (das eigentliche Geschehen) of Dasein” (Heidegger 1996, 352/384; emphasis added). The claim that “the power of destiny first becomes free” indicates a sense of a community which will be brought about through authentic action. An authentic individual’s leap to help an other opens itself toward social solidarity.

The Disclosure of the Historical World What is missing from Heidegger’s account is exactly how we can be authentically solicitous with and for others. What it is we are trying to do is fairly clear. As authentic, I recognize my responsibility within a community. I sense my fate and our destiny. So, an aspect of being authentically solicitous with others is to have them recognize our common heritage and destiny. By doing so, the authentic individual helps to establish a communal bond in a renewed sense. But there is something missing in the analysis up to this point. What I want to expose is the need for an appropriate hermeneutic axis point for the awareness of our common history to be disclosed to co-historizing Daseins. Heidegger seems to assume this level of understanding but does not develop how this level of insight is achieved. Once this is explained, the authentic community suggested by fundamental ontology will have a guiding principle: tolerance. Along with Wolin, I continually wonder how any particular individual has become open to the possibility of authentic resoluteness. We certainly see that other people can be so lost in their circumspective concerns that they need the assistance of an authentic Dasein to draw them toward their own conscience. What has given the Heideggerian exemplar so powerful an insight into the reality of human being? Heidegger, at times, seems to be aware of the issue: “(I)t is indisputable that a lively mutual acquaintanceship on the basis of Being-with often depends upon how tion to assist others is not a principle which must be enacted in each and every case. The obligation is “to act toward him in ways consistent with the possibility of being his conscience” (Vogel 1994, 91).

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far one’s own Dasein has understood itself at the time” (Heidegger 1962, 162/125; emphasis added).24 The odd thing about Heidegger’s analysis is that, in the end, it is conscience and not someone else who shows the truth of existence to the individual. It is conscience, as our anxious attunement to finitude, that provides the second-level awareness into the structure of self-world. Although anxiety and conscience may be suitable notions to account for our awareness of death, I do not think they are sufficient to bring about our historical awareness, especially our sense of destiny. I suggest that a confrontation with foreign ways of being-in-the-world is a necessary axis point for disclosing one’s world in an existential-ontological sense. Furthermore, an attempt to comprehend a foreign world is the necessary axis point for disclosing one’s own historical fate and destiny. Heidegger never develops these points given his perspective on the Other in Being and Time. Heidegger’s treatment of the Other is dominated by the idea of Being-with (Mitsein). The emphasis is placed on the sameness of others within Dasein’s ontic world. Dasein is always already with others in terms of a practical, work-oriented view. We already share the same world (derselben Welt). Thus, Heidegger says, “By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me. They are rather those from whom... one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too” (Heidegger 1962, 154/118). Given this level of correlation between me and everyone else, Heidegger makes an important point regarding the meaning of being. Because we already belong to the same world, we already share an understanding of the things which surround us. Thus, verbal communication (Mitteilung), as a place where meaning is shared between people, is given a derivative status in Heidegger’s analysis.25 Meaning primordially occurs in the active engagement with practices, whereas the sphere of face-to-face dialogue 24 The liberator had to be shown the way, it seems, since hiding from, avoiding, even fighting against the truth is an individual’s most normal, everyday way of dealing with reality (cf. Heidegger 1962, 234-5/190). Indeed, we could probably uncover a whole series of repressive attitudes when it comes to owning up to our hermeneutic nature, e.g., self-assurance, distraction, tranquilization (Heidegger 1962, 214-22/170–8). 25 However, if we consider the passage above, where communication is given a privileged role in establishing destiny, then we must be attentive to the context in which Heidegger discusses the derivative status of communication.

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is a place of disengagement, i.e., a loss of the world’s full existential significance. Linguistic assertions or propositional judgments about the world derive their significance from the pre-given realm of discourse (Rede), that is, the referential nexus of entities and purposes that makes up a coherent practice (Heidegger 1962, 203/160). We understand such a referential nexus by being able to work—which includes speaking and gesturing—competently within it. From out of that familiarity, discrete propositional judgments about the things within the nexus make sense. This is what Heidegger means when he says that the “primordial ‘as’ of an interpretation which understands circumspectively we call the ‘existential-hermeneutical ‘as’ in distinction from the ‘apophantical ‘as’ of the assertion” (Heidegger 1962, 201/158). By exclusively focusing on people with whom I already share a common world, Heidegger misses important disclosing events. I would like to suggest two additional triggering events that relate to the phenomenon of world-disclosure. The first can take place within an established tradition. The second takes place between traditions. Regarding the former, consider the master/apprentice relationship as an example. Any master within a particular field will most likely be saddled with the responsibility for training someone new to the practice. Since the novice knows nothing of the tools, parts, physical demands, etc. involved with this world, the master must show a level of tolerance toward the apprentice’s ignorance. The master must recognize that the novice does not come equipped with the fore-knowledge of the region in question and, so, a degree of clumsiness is going to occur during the training process. Without going into an elaborate account of how an apprentice becomes a master, I simply want to highlight the fact that the master’s confrontation with a person unfamiliar with a world, as well as the novice’s recognition of being an alien to this world, is the kind of axis point necessary (even if not sufficient) for the disclosure of the world as world to an individual. This follows because the master and apprentice can both reflect about who they are in terms of a world. The level of frustration involved with trying to help (and wanting to be helped by) someone enter a world can give way to a comprehension of how much one is tied (or not tied) to such a world. Certainly, such a level of reflection is not achieved in Heidegger’s accounts of the breakdown of harmony through conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy. Heidegger admits that these phenomena remain circumspectively focused on the task at hand. But to understand the significance

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of the existential-ontological meaning of world, the individual must understand the correlation between Dasein and world. In authenticity, the individual recognizes how the referential totality of the world refers back to Dasein, having no significance without Dasein, just as Dasein is nothing without the world (Heidegger 1962, 417/365). This level of awareness can be gained through an encounter with someone who is a stranger (ein Fremder) to my world. The stranger draws out of me an awareness of my own intimate relationship to the world because the other presents a world different from my own. The other presents to me the reality of other worlds and, thereby, creates the space or gap (Kluft) necessary for reflection about my own being-in-the-world. There is a second point to make regarding the power of the other. In this master/apprentice relationship, we can assume a level of belonging to the same culture. How do they–master and apprentice–become aware of this deeper background of co-commitment? A second kind of triggering event is necessary for disclosing the deeper, historical dimension of fate and destiny. When we recognize our fate and destiny, we are critically aware of an extreme limit to the possibilities available to us when choosing a world. The experience of fate is the experience of a limit situation (Grenzsituationen).26 How does this occur? I suggest that we become aware of our historical limits through a confrontation with a kind of otherness which cannot be appropriated into our being-in-the-world. In Being and Time, Heidegger only briefly mentions an encounter with foreign ways of life. What he has to say about such confrontations seems to suggest the opposite of what I am arguing. He states that interest in other ways of life or cultures will foreclose a truly disclosive experience: With special regard to the interpretation of Dasein, the opinion may now arise that understanding the most alien cultures (fremdesten Kulturen) and “synthesizing” them with one’s own may lead to Dasein’s becoming for the first time thoroughly and genuinely enlightened about itself. Versatile curiosity and restlessly “knowing it all” masquerade as a universal understanding of Dasein (Heidegger 1962, 222/178).

26 Heidegger derives the notion of the limit situation from Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews (Heidegger 1962, 356/308; 496, note xv/301 fn. 7).

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I maintain that Heidegger is not dismissing my proposal out of hand. To see why, we must take note of Heidegger’s reference to curiosity (Neugier) in this quotation. Curiosity is, within the analytic of Dasein, a way of being absorbed in the world, i.e., a mode of fallenness or inauthenticity. One’s curiosity is directed toward alien phenomena with the goal of knowing the phenomena in question. Individuals can, of course, gain a genuine understanding of things which at first fascinate their curiosity. The apprentice can become the master. Heidegger is not suggesting otherwise. What Heidegger identifies as versatile curiosity is different from, what we can call, productive curiosity. Versatile curiosity takes an interest in a whole multitude of things; and this restless desire to know it all is an impossible task given the finite reality of being human. Versatile curiosity is an impoverished way of life insofar as the person is not attuned to the impossibility of maintaining too many worlds and, so, wastes time on too many pursuits. Heidegger certainly put his finger on a rather common, restless attitude of modern day life. It is one of the reasons why communication (Mitteilung) is not treated with much significance within his analysis. Following on the heels of versatile curiosity, there is a tendency to be overly sure about matters we do not genuinely understand. Heidegger captures this way of inauthentic communication in what he calls idle conversation (Gerede). When we see and hear things on the television or read things in the newspaper, we often discuss the issues with a false sense of assurance. So, curiosity, in a pejorative sense, is a kind of busying oneself with all sorts of issues without really gaining an understanding of any. And idle conversation is the way we go about communicating with each other about things we do not really understand. I am interested, therefore, in uncovering a confrontation with an alien culture which is not like Heidegger’s notion of curiosity. At the point when the alien other appears to be beyond my powers of synthesis, then the most profound hermeneutic disclosure about myself can occur. When I am confronted with someone who cannot be understood, then a mode of historical disclosure becomes available to me. A particularly pertinent example of this level of disclosure is the unifying mood which came about, in the United States and elsewhere, after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon Building. Part of our shock on this fateful day was caused by our understanding that these were deliberate acts. The recognition that

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people chose to fly airplanes into buildings was a source of stupefaction. What we would call acts of suicide and murder were taken as heroic and moral actions by another group of people. Although shocking, these events did trigger a sense of a communal bond between us. In relation to Heidegger’s analysis, two particularly important points must be noted. First, the others’ actions brought a sense of unheimlichkeit to us. We were presented with a home-world (Heimwelt) that we could not comprehend. Now, this is vastly different from Heidegger’s account of this rupturing mood. For Heidegger, it is precisely the nothingness or alterity of death, conscience, and one’s own self without a world which triggers our concern for the meaning of being. Yet, with the alien other, we have a triggering event for this mood which is a material presence. The second important point to note is that this mode of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) has a way of bringing out our background solidarity immediately. Our solidarity is not brought to us through the actions of an authentic comrade; rather, it is an affective disposition disclosed to us through our reaction to the alien homeworld. Regardless of our regionally distinct concerns, our deep bond to basic principles, norms or values can be revealed to us through the (shocking) actions of others. When we confront an alien homeworld such a confrontation can force us to recognize the limited possibilities which have been handed down to us from the past as guiding our resolute actions toward the future. I recognize who I am when the alien other brings to me an awareness of my deep belonging to a community. Although I can try to get into the other’s world, imagining how such actions could be taken as moral and heroic, I simply have no existential comprehension of this reality. Indeed, I discover that I just do not have the stomach for this kind of behavior. Recognizing this limit situation allows me to acknowledge my belonging to a heritage. The incomprehensibility of the other gives me an insight into myself as committed to a certain set of values. My (our) deep background is revealed through an alien homeworld. If I am correct that other practical worlds are a necessary axis point for one’s own historical world-disclosure to occur, thereby making authentic choice possible, we have to reformulate Heidegger’s negative account of having a versatile curiosity with other cultures. Although it is possible to take an unproductive interest in what other people are doing, it remains the case that an awareness of other worlds is a necessary condition for an awareness of the contingency of my heritage. Only if I

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am confronted with that which seems to be totally beyond me can I ever recognize the contingency of a history as well as my deep belonging to a heritage. Heidegger, unfortunately, only speaks of the voice of conscience as this moment of radical disclosure. Thus, the key triggering event, for Heidegger, is the individual’s sense of responsibility in the face of his or her own contingency. I do not deny that humans, at a certain age anyway, have a natural apprehension of their non-relational possibility, i.e., death. And I grant the significance this can have on caring for the meaningfulness of life. But being-authentic includes a historical comprehension as well. I do not see how conscience, as Heidegger explains this phenomenon, has the power to disclose this level of awareness to the individual. Again, it is the presence of another person’s difference from me which can bring about this level of disclosure. Conscience, as Heidegger understands this phenomenon, seems to be built upon a prior experience with the material presence of an alien homeworld.

(In)Tolerance Earlier, I claimed that fundamental ontology might suggest a more principled kind of action. The truth of pluralism is the ground for just such a principle. On the one hand, the truth of pluralism includes an acceptance of the fact that my world is not the only possible way of being in the world (cf. Vogel 1994, 101). On the other hand, given the problem of violence in some world-views, such an acceptance is troubling without a normative principle as a guide. Tolerance is the principle which can limit what kind of world-views are taken as legitimate insofar as tolerance is grounded in Heidegger’s primordial